Is your data safe in the cloud? Our experience shows it is NOT
Dear readers and business partners
We are happy to be back and would like to apologise for the interruption of our services due to a fire on March 10 at the OVH data centre hosting our servers and websites.
This came as an unpleasant surprise to us as, like most people, we thought that one of the benefits of the cloud was that our sites were safe. It turns out that this is not correct and that in the end sites are hosted on one particular server and that these servers are far from being secured. There should be back-ups and indeed there are backups. However these backups have been encrypted for security reasons and the only ways to decrypt the data is to use the server that encrypted them – which is a catch 22 if the server has been destroyed by fire…
The disaster of the OVH data centre just shows how fragile the digital world has become: over 6000 companies have lost their sites and data with no much chance to recover anything – how many of them will survive it? Who is responsible? is the loss of data covered by insurance?
These are all questions that will need to be answered and should make every company think again about the safety of their data housed in the cloud.
As a result we have been moving our sites over to Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform using our own backup data. This has also meant having to fully test the operation of the sites on the new provider to ensure that everything runs smoothly for our readers. As you can imagine, with tens of thousand articles and the most extensive database of news in the electronics industry, this is a considerable task but it will allow us to continue to deliver the latest news and unparalleled in-depth analysis to our readers.
Thanks for your understanding and continuing support.
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