‘It just disappeared’: woman loses online business with disappearance of all content in the cloud

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Cloud computing is increasingly popular — but when it fails, it can be chaos. Natalie Brown has turned her blog into a thriving business over the course of a decade, putting a lot of effort into it. Until, one day, he disappeared. “I felt sick. It slowly dawned on me… it was just gone,” says Brown, a blogger who writes about motherhood and author of Confessions of a Crummy Mummy. Her website was hosted on cloud service provider Gridhost, which closed in November. Brown never received any notice of the closure because her blog had been created by a third-party company, which had ceased operations. And she didn’t have access to the blog’s backup either, as it had also been hosted in the cloud by Gridhost. Stressful days followed. Many tears were shed. Cloud computing, in which information and software is stored in distant data centers and accessed via the internet, is increasingly popular. It allows, for example, small businesses to set up email or data processing facilities without having to maintain their own IT infrastructure. But when things go wrong, the consequences can be dire. Cloud services can be subject to intermittent outages or outages caused by technical glitches, cybersecurity attacks, or even lightning strikes. In Brown’s case, the blog is a direct source of income. Companies that make maternity/parenting products pay her, for example, to link to them or to post certain content on her blog. “It literally puts food on our table,” she says. Brown claims that tsoHost, which owns Gridhost, did not allow her access to the blog’s data, and she was only able to recover it after enlisting the help of her former web developer. “He said it took him about six hours negotiating with them,” she recalls. The blog is now live again on another platform, and Brown has scheduled backups with another provider. A spokesperson for tsoHost said the company tried to reach out to customers prior to Gridhost’s closure: “We understand that the decision to retire the Gridhost platform will be disappointing, and tsoHost is working closely with customers to support the migrations”. The use of cloud services, by definition, makes a company dependent on third parties, says Vili Lehdonvirta, a professor at the Oxford Internet Institute in the United Kingdom and author of the book Cloud Empires (“Empires of the Cloud”, in free translation). “What is the cloud? Well, the cloud is someone else’s computer,” he explains. And cloud outages are not uncommon. Amazon Web Services, the world’s largest cloud service provider, suffered a partial outage in December 2021, affecting thousands of customers. Also, cloud services are sometimes down, such as Gridhost. Google will retire its IoT Core cloud platform in August. People use it to connect smart home devices, among other things. Data from the Uptime Institute, a consulting organization, suggests that while the cloud is not becoming significantly less reliable overall, costly outages are becoming more common. “More than 60% of failures result in at least US$ 100 thousand (about R$ 512 thousand) in total losses, substantially above the 39% in 2019”, says the institute. Cloud computing is increasingly popular among businesses, says Kristina McElheran of the University of Toronto in Canada. She and her colleagues regularly conduct large-scale surveys of hundreds of thousands of companies across the United States. Citing other studies, she also notes that the shift to remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic has further accelerated cloud adoption. “The cloud is a game changer for survival, growth and productivity for new (companies), especially new and small (companies)”, explains McElheran, referring to startups. “But this is where the tradeoff comes in — they lose control.” One small business owner who knows this all too well is Pokey Bolton, an artist and event organizer based in Napa Valley, California. In early December 2022, its cloud email provider Rackspace was the target of a ransomware attack, affecting thousands of customers. “I’m furious,” she says. This comes at a particularly sensitive time, as early December is when Bolton traditionally gets a lot of bookings for its annual crafts workshops in January. “It’s my big cash generator, it’s essential to my business,” she notes. Hundreds of people usually sign up — but given that she had no access to her email for several days, she’s not sure how many entries may have been lost this year. Bolton has switched email providers and says she has attempted to close her Rackspace account but has yet to receive written confirmation of this. She also doesn’t know if the hackers accessed her email accounts, which contained some customer data and other sensitive information. A Rackspace spokeswoman said the company had been able to help more than three-quarters of affected customers set up new email services on another platform. “We are proactively reaching out individually to those who still need assistance,” she added. Rackspace is posting updates on the situation online. It’s important to remember, however, the many benefits of cloud computing, says Lehdonvirta, particularly when it comes to uptime, a measure of how long a computer system runs without crashing. “Despite these famous interruptions… [os provedores de nuvem] are capable of delivering insane uptimes, which are very difficult to achieve in a smaller scale operation,” he explains. Also, software running in the cloud can get the latest updates instantly, which should help keep you In general, cloud companies are able to offer very reliable services because they can spread computing across multiple data centres, says Paul Watson, director of the National Data Innovation Center at the University of Newcastle in the UK.” What you can do is detect the failure of one data center and move to use the resources in another,” he says. Few small companies or startups have this ability – if any that do. From time to time, however , a company turns its back on the cloud. The chief technology officer of US software company 37signals recently revealed that his company would be moving away from the cloud, partly because of costs but also because of reliability concerns. in. Better information about the risk of outages can help companies make informed choices, notes McElheran. And if the cloud computing industry becomes less competitive and less reliable over time, policymakers may have to step in to force improvements. But despite the recent disruptions, she adds, “I don’t think we’re there yet.”

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