The net result is that the websites and email accounts for 4800 customers have been completely lost, the data is unrecoverable, and Distribute.IT has had to sell off their entire business to provide continuity of service for their remaining customers.

With so much devastation caused in such a short space of time for one of Australia’s most reputable hosting providers, I believe this raises some important issues for us all, but especially for you as a Digital Hybrid customer and as a user of at least a part of our ezycloud communications suite.

Some Straight Talk

Obviously I’m a proponent of cloud services, otherwise I wouldn’t have established Digital Hybrid, so this may surprise you when I say that as much as there are benefits to the cloud, I also believe there’s an inherent danger in the cloud.

My concerns are not because cloud services are unstable or insecure; far from it. My concern is that the “language of the cloud” is progressively and subliminally suggesting to its users, that it’s the “cure for all ills” when it comes to their data.

And if you as a cloud user allow yourself to believe that, you’re already in serious trouble.

Is my Data Safe with Digital Hybrid?

Yes … but … the world of IT and Murphy’s Law are extremely well acquainted. If something can go wrong, it will go wrong; which is why Digital Hybrid has a range of redundancies and mitigation processes in place to minimise these events.

As with any cloud services provider, we do everything possible to protect our systems and your data. Our standard practices include daily backups of all our systems and the data contained in them. These backups are stored on separate storage servers to the live services. This data is only accessible from our local network, and is not accessible to the outside world.

All production servers, data storage and backups are configured in mirrored RAID arrays, meaning real-time, simultaneous data replication to multiple hard drives, and many of our services run in high availability clusters, where if one machine in the cluster fails, data is not lost.

Am I responsible for my data management once it’s in the Cloud?

Of course!  If your data is the lifeblood of your business, you need to manage it to ensure its integrity. You should never abdicate your personal responsibility and leave the management of your data entirely to the care of a third party.

The power of the cloud is not found when it’s used on its own. The real power comes when the cloud is used in tandem with local strategies.

Put simply, if you entrust a set of your data to us remotely, you should always have a matching set of your data locally.

Same data + different locations = redundancy and safety.

Some Practical Suggestions

ezywebsites
Initiate weekly or monthly backups of your entire webhosting account from cPanel and download those backups to your local PC.

ezyexchange
Always run Outlook in “Exchange Cached Mode”. This ensures you have a complete working copy of your mailbox on your PC. Also, do regular weekly or monthly exports of your mailbox to a local PST file.

ezybackup
The ezybackup software lets you run backups both to your local PC or server and to our private cloud. Why not buy yourself an external hard drive and do both types of backups?

ezydomains
Always keep a copy of your domain’s EPP Key (domain password) on file to ensure you can manage it or transfer it if you ever need to. And always keep a copy of your SSL certificate on hand in case you ever need to reinstall it for any reason.

The Moral of the Story

Your data is still your data. If you take my advice and follow some of these simple steps to cover yourself, realistically, if a Distribute.IT-type disaster was to hit Digital Hybrid, you could easily have all your services up and running again with alternative providers within an hour.

It all comes down to common sense.