In a high-profile event Monday, Google Mail disappeared for a large number of users. Google has since recovered the missing email from backups and blamed the issue on a software problem.
This is a great learning moment: if your data is stored in the cloud, does the provider adequately backup the data? In this case, even though Google keeps multiple copies of data, the software problem caused all online copies of the data to be lost. Fortunately for its users, Google had offline copies of the data and was able to restore from backups.
As a Google Mail user, I was not even aware of the policies and procedures Google has for managing the data in the Google Mail system. I, as millions of others, had signed up for Google Mail because of the free service with lots of storage. I have stayed with Google Mail because of the price and functionality, and it has been reliable for the many years I have used it.
The due diligence and risk management issues are being documented as part of cloud provider analysis best practices strategies by the Cloud Security Alliance. As we've just seen, it is important to evaluate and know a cloud provider's security and reliability plans and practices before trusting important data to that provider.
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