Nine PBS is afraid that it will lose over 70 years of archival materials and programming after its contracted cloud storage vendor has apparently gone out of business. According to Current, the channel used Open Source Storage, or OSS, for storing over 50TB of data — but it suddenly lost access to its data earlier this year. Nine PBS has been working with OSS and its predecessor since 2019 and intended to renew its contract on March 6 of this year. The company never responded and abruptly cut off the station’s data access even though it still had 30 days to retrieve its data after the contract ended.
The station dug a little bit deeper when it discovered that the OSS website no longer existed and was listed as delinquent under the Colorado Secretary of State. It also discovered that OSS utilized Iron Mountain’s services, so it sent a demand letter to the latter to preserve its data and to “pay any reasonable costs associated with its demand.” At the time, Iron Mountain did not confirm or deny that it possessed Nine PBS’ data.
But the cloud is safe secure and forever how could this happen
It’s safe if you’re following proper backup procedures.
3 backups in 2 different forms of media with 1 being off-site
A single point of failure is always a bad thing.
Yeah, the cloud makes proper 3-2-1 backups easier, *but you still need to take care of the rest of the 3-2-1. The cloud takes care of a third of the 3, half of the 2, and satisfies the 1. But it’s not a complete 3-2-1 backup by itself, and anyone selling it as such is blowing smoke up your ass to get a sale.
If done right, a third party could do 3-2-1 for you.
But unlike in this case, to do it right your clients need to know where the data is stored, and any 3rd party you contract with should have a clause that establishes your client as the data owner (as well as requirements for data return if the business closes).
This would have been easily avoidable, most likely if IT was allowed to be part of the contracting discussion.