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Many users of Microsoft’s Office 365 and Google’s Workspace count on those vendors to backup and recover their data in case of a user oopsie or the vendor’s technical failure. Most of the time that works.
Except in certain very rare cases, the vendor is not liable for your data. Period. They want to be reliable as a marketing tool, but that is very different than being liable in case of a problem. Check your written agreement.
In 2021 an EU competitor to Amazon Web Services, OVH, had a fire in their data center in Strasbourg, France. The data center is comprised of four buildings with some common core services like telecommunications, co-located on a campus. The fire completely destroyed one of the buildings and damaged one of the others. The other two buildings were put out of commission as the fire department shut off power and the common core services were damaged.
After the fire was out, the CEO of OVH held a press conference. What did he say?
We recommend that our clients execute their disaster recovery plan.
Millions of websites went offline and a few hundred thousand companies lost all of their data if they had not taken their own steps to protect it.
Fast forward to this month.
Google, in what might be called a giant oopsie, deleted the entire account of Australian pension fund UniSuper. The company manages pensions to the tune of $125 billion.
Oh, yeah, Google also deleted all of the company’s backups.
What was Google’s reply to the problem?
We have taken steps to ensure such a disruption does not occur again.
The data is gone. The backups are gone. UniSuper has no recourse from Google.
If you look at any cloud provider’s shared responsibility matrix, you will see that your data falls squarely into your responsibility.
If you backup your data at the same provider as your primary data source and say, the “do a Google”, you are out of luck. Doing a Google – I’m going to start using that term.
It appears that UniSuper had backups but they were down for about a week recovering it.
Still, being down for a week is much better than losing $125 billion of other people’s money.
SO, if your data is important to you, having a very robust backup plan is crucial.
We keep a backup copy of our data at a third party provider and we keep multiple other copies of our data in a bank vault. Literally. We take our responsibility seriously.
Also very important – this does not ONLY apply to Google and Microsoft. Any other cloud provider that stores your data likely will say that they are not responsible for your, say, accounting, HR, payroll, CRM or other business data.
If you need help constructing a robust data backup and recovery strategy, please contact us.