
Well, I don't like to say...
I told you so... oh, go on then... I told you so!
Cisco has admitted to a cloud configuration cockup that erased customer data. The networking giant explained: “On August 3rd, 2017, our engineering team made a configuration change that applied an erroneous policy to our North American object storage service and caused certain data uploaded prior to 11:20AM Pacific time on …
Only use cloud for copies of stuff for the public (to have capacity), or for temporary loads.
Have a tested backup and disaster recovery plan, with off site storage (even if for small companies it's only a USB HDD the boss takes home). You backup the Cloud, never TO the Cloud as it's a 3rd party with unknown security, privacy and reliability. If you believe Cloud Marketing specs, with no independent audit, I have some bridges for sale, really cheap.
leaving aside the incident and clear inability to recover from backup, this isn't a trivial thing for some
we're a meraki managed service provider, every single managed organization (i.e. customer or demo instance) has lost data, some of these are global companies with many sites
the floor plans are gone, as are mounting photos, these aren't just eye candy, they are needed to help people find the correct device out of possibly hundreds
floor plans can be recovered and uploaded, that still leaves scaling and positioning every one of the buggers, that'll be many days of effort, multifloor sites are especially fiddly
but mounting photos are sent direct from the meraki app to the cloud, to replace them means someone going to every device at every site in every country and retaking them
this is the first incident on such a scale they've had, mistakes are made, that's life
but Cisco not having backup is not a mistake, especially as they give us no way to make our own
"but Cisco not having backup is not a mistake, especially as they give us no way to make our own"
I was going to chastise you for not having your own backups, but really, you can't make your own?
We ruled them out a long time ago. We din't like the protection racket model.
"Nice firewall you have there, be a shame should something happen to it if you don't agree to our price hikes."
yep, they give no way to make our own backup, snapshot state, or, ideally, pull a complete copy of an instance offline to save
our policy is to keep records of everything practical, we manually document a lot even though it adds overhead, but as they claim to have our data replicated multiple times and to back it up nightly, it seemed like it really ought to be recoverable in the event of mistake!
yeah, it's not right for all situations, aside from the licensing model the configuration constraints sometimes rule it out, but if you're a corporate the overall tco is fine, and they are generally good at things like homologation and logistics requirements for global deployment - some of the alternatives are pure pain once you get outside usa/eu
I had one of their free trial AP units with 3 years licensing. Stopped working as soon as the 3 year ran out. £350+ to renew each year. They can go suck a fat one. And they expect me to make purchasing decisions based on that price??!!
Now if Aston Martin gave me a Vanquish free for three years, I'd take them up on the offer too. I wouldn't recommend them to the fleet the company.
"I had one of their free trial AP units with 3 years licensing. Stopped working as soon as the 3 year ran out. £350+ to renew each year. "
£350??? who told you that?
even if you buy just one year, per-AP is $150 rack rate for license and hardware replacement service (LIC-ENT-1YR), it drops fast if you go multiyear... $300 for 3-year, i.e. $100/year
Your comparisions to AWS and Google are not relevant.
(But this reminds of the time we had two similar locked boxes in the mailroom, one for off-site storage, the other for secure recycling. I remarked on the similarity to a colleague, who replied: it only matters when you need to restore a backup.)