4 cloud horror stories — and how to survive them

Grazed from InfoWorld.  Author:  John Brandon.

Horror stories don’t just happen at the movie theater. In a few cases, companies make a big play to use the wrong cloud application or experience widespread outages in their connection to cloud storage.  While vendors claim that cloud services are secure and reliable, that’s not always the case. A better way than relying or vendor promises? Make sure your migration plans, budgets, existing infrastructure, security and any ancillary services all match up before making the jump to the cloud.

What happens when a cloud provider declares bankruptcy?

Late last year, a cloud storage company called Nirvanix shut down and gave customers only a few weeks to move data to a different provider. According to Charles King, an IT analyst, this meant companies with terabytes or even petabytes of data in the cloud had to act quickly. "A business should always have a strong sense of the assets it has stored in the cloud, but it needs to consider those points in terms of the time and cost of retrieving them," King says…


In the case of Nirvanix, one client noted that, due to the company’s download bandwidth limitations, it would need 27 days, in a best-case scenario, to recover all data. "That was cutting things pretty close since they were given just 30 days’ notice to remove everything," King says…

Read more from the source @ http://www.infoworld.com/d/cloud-computing/4-cloud-horror-stories-and-how-survive-them-247791