The Sidekick, Disaster Recovery and a Cloud Opportunity

File this blog under “serendipity”. 

At the time of this writing, I’m sure we have all heard about the data disaster concerning the Sidekick cellphone. The Sidekick may have the distinction of being the first cloud cellphone, and while never a threat to the BlackBerry or iPhone, had a loyal customer base and a solid following in the under-25 market, the barometer of hip.

All user data was stored by T-Mobile (working with Microsoft subsidiary Danger) in the cloud, it does not sync with a PC - an interesting feature of the Sidekick as well as other smart phones such as the Palm Pre. Last week, Sidekick users started suffering from outages, and then seeing their contact information disappear. Passwords, contact lists, pictures, you name it – gone. Microsoft is working to see if the deleted data can be restored, and after a few tense moments earlier this week, it now looks promising.

When defining the cloud (and believe me, every day on my Twitter account at least two people ask that question) there are as many definitions as there are people to describe it. I believe the common feature is that the primary software and storage is stored remotely from the users, and is effectively black boxed from those who are using it. We don’t care that there are 1,000 servers or 3,000 servers – or (for the most part) where they are. As a cloud customer, I care only that my storage capability is available when needed. And for goodness sake, make sure that the data is secure and if it is damaged for some reason, well, I shouldn’t know the difference.

The bigger question here for the future of services tied to cloud computing is disaster recovery (DR). It would seem to me a natural use of the cloud if there ever was one. Catastrophic loss of data due to an act of God (think earthquake), or man (think September 11) takes out your server farm - your customers still need their data.  I’ve worked all over the US and it's pretty clear that 9/11 did a lot for the DR evangelists among us.  The Sidekick incident might be the rallying cry for the mobile ecosystem.

In California, companies I’ve worked for have been planning disaster recovery since probably the day after the 1906 Earthquake. Several CIOs have told me that it wasn’t a major priority on the East Coast, but 9/11 changed all of that forever. The need to have your backup data stored in a physically removed location from your production data is crucial, and the cloud is perfect for that. The advantages are clear: no/low equipment and maintenance costs, a potentially vendor agnostic hardware setup, and the ability to conduct full testing performance or load testing without impacting your production environment.

However, a recent Symantec survey of 1000 IT managers and came up with some stunning facts, including this one: 35% - yes, over one in three - of an organization's servers are not included in a DR plan. No performance or disaster recovery testing. The news for the systems that are tested isn’t going to prompt parades. In the same survey, 30% of the respondents reported failure in their testing, whether it be incomplete backups or slow performance. This led Internet News to proclaim “DR testing is a mess”.

I could be on an island on this one, but think that performance testing should be considered an aspect of DR (or vice-versa). Imagine the scenario that your servers are disrupted by a 6.0 quake - known in California as a minor shake up (smile) - I would expect my DR planning to demand fast on-boarding of the backups and the performance of the cloud servers should be (ideally) as fast as the primary in-house servers. 

Risk management has always been a concern for cloud advocates and others see this as the hype bubble being pricked. But as in many cases in life, trouble can be opportunity in work clothes. Time will tell, but I don't see this as a case to be made against using the cloud for data storage. Rather this is a good reason why a solid, risk-managed cloud strategy for rapid, high-performance disaster recovery spells can spell opportunity for businesses and enhance consumer confidence. 

More on this the next post.

Comments

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Regards
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I could be on an island on this one, but think that performance testing should be considered an aspect of DR (or vice-versa). Imagine the scenario that your servers are disrupted by a 6.0 quake - known in California as a minor shake up (smile) - I would expect my DR planning to demand fast on-boarding of the backups and the performance of the cloud servers should be (ideally) as fast as the primary in-house servers.

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