Phil Factor (3/11/2013)
@JeffIf you know of a small or medium-sized business that hasn't got any offsite backups, what would you advise them? You know my views on security, but you'd find me telling them to get a backup tool that offers 256-bit AES encryption for backups and then store the encrypted backups in AWS or Azure blob storage. I know of no cases where this combination has been hacked. Sure, if you leave the ids and passwords lying around maybe, then someone might use them but not through frontal attack. I'm all for balancing the risks, and I can think of plenty of businesses who have been destroyed by losing their data.
Yes, I agree that kind of security is obvious but the security of backups is not what I was talking about. And, no... I'd likely not suggest to a small or medium-size business to send their backups to the cloud, secure or not. I've not checked the price in a while but it used to be that for a year's worth of cloud-based backup charges, you could buy a pretty nice tape backup system, a couple of years worth of tapes, and secure offsite storage. Although I agree that being able to electronically retreive your backups has some good advantage, it it does no good during an emergency if the cloud site is in a basement in New York city during a super storm (for example).
There are plenty of ways to not lose all of your data. Any serious business, even medium sized business, will have an offsite mirror site up and running ready to take over if the primary site goes down. Long before that happens, the servers would have shifted to their local mirrors. They'll also have physical backups in secure offsite storage as previously mentioned. For small businesses that can't afford that, then maybe the cloud would be the right place but, if it were my small business, I'd at least back that up with secure offsite tape storeage.
Getting back onto the subject of using the cloud, I know I sound skeptical but I just don't trust other folks with my databases from a security aspect, an availability aspect, or a performance aspect not to mention the backup aspect. I know I won't lose any data. If a cloud based provider lost even a byte of my data or I was down because their service failed, I'd be making a road trip in a postal uniform and carrying an axe. 😉 The cloud <> HA, IMHO.
Further, when you compare products like Azure to SQL Server, I'm finding that Azure comes up short in a couple of areas. I agree that not necessarily having to worry about hardware and operating system upgrades is a good thing in many cases, but I'd have to make another road trip if someone did an upgrade that my systems might not be compatible with and it took my systems down as a result.
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.