Sidekick Outage Highlight Fallibility of Cloud Services

The recent outage and potential irretrievable data loss in Microsoft’s Sidekick services highlights one of the fundamental flaws in much of what today is known as cloud computing.  That is, not only is there the possibility of one’s data being inaccessible due to a service outage, but there is the very real possibility that data may be lost forever because of a failure of the service provider to adequately backup its systems.  Ordinarily, these types of risks are easily mitigated by the inclusion of strict protections in your contract with the service provider ensuring data will be available when needed and backed-up to protect against catastrophic failures. 



The problem is that these fundamental protections are simply not achievable for individuals and many businesses in their cloud service provider contracts.  Why?  Because many cloud services, including the Sidekick service, many online backup and file storage services, most Google services, and many others, are provided almost entirely on an as-is basis, with no warranties of any kind.  Moreover, even in the case of complete data loss, the provider will have little or no liability.  This is a fact of life.  If you choose to take advantage of many of these services, you must do so at your own risk.  Caveat emptor never meant so much. 



As a result of the foregoing, if you do choose to assume the risk of using these types of services and the contract cannot be negotiated, you must take your own measures to ensure your data is backed-up.  That means having to do it yourself.  Fortunately, most services have at least rudimentary data export capabilities through which you can backup your data.  Obviously, having to remember to run your own backups diminishes the convenience of cloud services, but the alternative is to rely on vendors that have no real responsibility if they ultimately lose your data.