It almost goes without saying that public cloud users don’t need to backup their data. But only almost. It turns out there are times when backing up cloud data makes sense and there are important questions all cloud customers need to know the answers to.

Worry about these…

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Here are some of the issues to consider in determining how secure your cloud and SaaS data really is:

Redundancy — Many will remember when a thunderstorm took out an Amazon East Coast data center and effectively shut-down Netflix and other online businesses. It is fair to ask whether redundant copies of a cloud provider’s data are stored alongside the live data or someplace else. You don’t want all copies of your important data living in a single building or maybe even a single time zone.

Loss of access — If your cloud/SaaS vendor suffers, say, from a buggy update they can probably recover lost data. Probably. But it may take a while. Local copies of your data can help mitigate this exposure. As can selecting vendors with proven records of meeting terms of their service level agreements. Along this line, you may remember the 2009 loss of data from some T-Mobile smartphones.

Malware — Could and SaaS providers are experts at protecting their data, but offline modes that save data locally still have the potential to cause data loss, especially to shared folders where only one user’s machine must be infected to access all the files. Using cloud storage and cloud apps does not remove the need for protecting users’ hardware from threats. Google Drive accounts are especially attractive targets.

Social engineering hacks — Training users to prevent these attacks seems to only go so far. Protecting your data by compartmentalizing it can help by limiting the damage that any set of credentials can be used to cause. Having a backup of at least your most important cloud data kept away from general user access may be a good idea for some companies.

User errors and rogue users — Another reason to maintain an independent backup of your data is because of the damage users can do, accidentally or on purpose. There is also the issue of services permanently deleting user data when a user is deleted. Such information can die an immediate death, so only an independent backup can save you.

(This post is based in part on information from backupify, which provides reasonably priced cloud-to-cloud backups for Google Apps, Salesforce and social media.)

Don’t worry about these…

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Meanwhile, here are some things backupify says not to worry about:

• Hardware failure, which cloud vendors deal with almost as a science, managing and predicting server and drive failures.
• Malware related to data stored only in the cloud and not on users’ own hardware.

Like many, I’d always just assumed that cloud data was out-of-sight/out-of-mind, especially after Dropbox helped me deal with some large accidental data losses. But once I started thinking about it, I realized that while the cloud is almost immune to some causes of data loss, there are others we still need to protect ourselves against.

So, yes, it is probably a good idea to backup your cloud.

photo credit: Marty.FM via photopin cc