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Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

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Re: Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

#161

Post by DarkmSparks »

fabian2k wrote: post #106
kristianc wrote: post #95

The government official who insisted that commercial AWS/GCP/Azure couldn't possibly be trusted with keeping the information will be keeping their head low for a few days then... "The Interior Ministry explained that while most systems at the Daejeon data center are backed up daily to separate equipment within the same center and to a physically remote backup facility, the G-Drive’s structure did not allow for extern…

Using the cloud would have been the easiest way to achieve the necessary redundancy, but by far not the only one. This is just a flawed concept from the start, with no real redundancy.

But not security. And for governmental data security is a far more important consideration.

not losing data and keeping untrusted parties out of your data is a hard problem, that "cloud" aka "stored somewhere that is accessible by agents of a foreign nation" does not solve.

Re: Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

#162

Post by senordevnyc »

rvba wrote: post #114
aio2 wrote: post #52

Funny, because the same thing happened in Nepal a few weeks ago. Protestors/rioters burned some government buildings, along with the tech infrastructure within them, so now almost all electronic data is gone.

Happened in Bladerunner too

And Fight Club

Re: Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

#163

Post by g-b-r »

stogot wrote: post #127
eCa wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree completely that it's absolute wild to run such a system without backups. But at this point no government should keep critical data on foreign cloud storage.

Why not? If the region is in country, encrypted, and with proven security attestations validated by third parties, a backup to a cloud storage would be incredibly wise. Otherwise we might end up reading an article about a fire burning down a single data center

And which organization has every file, from each of their applications using the cloud, encrypted *before* it is sent to the cloud?

Re: Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

#164

Post by DarkmSparks »

kspacewalk2 wrote: post #153
zhouzhao wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can encrypt them at rest, but data that lies encrypted and is never touched, is useless data. You need to decrypt them as well. Also, plenty of incompetent devops around, and writing a decryption toolchain can be difficult.

Am I missing something? If you ever need to use this data, obviously you transfer it back to your premises and then decrypt it. Whether it's stored at Amazon or North Korean Government Cloud makes no difference whatsoever if you encrypt before and decrypt after transfer.

Encryption only protects data for an unknown period of time, not indefinately.

Re: Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

#165

Post by moduspol »

MangoCoffee wrote: post #76

It's hard to believe this happened. South Korea has tech giants like Samsung, and yet this is how the government runs? Is the US government any better?

Our incompetence in the US is much more distributed. It wouldn't surprise me if the same kind of data isn't backed up, but at least it's dozens of separate federal agencies not-backing up their data in different physical places.

Re: Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

#166

Post by crazygringo »

stogot wrote: post #127
eCa wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree completely that it's absolute wild to run such a system without backups. But at this point no government should keep critical data on foreign cloud storage.

Why not? If the region is in country, encrypted, and with proven security attestations validated by third parties, a backup to a cloud storage would be incredibly wise. Otherwise we might end up reading an article about a fire burning down a single data center

Exactly.

Like, don't store it in the cloud of an enemy country of course.

But if it's encrypted and you're keeping a live backup in a second country with a second company, ideally with a different geopolitical alignment, I don't see the problem.

Re: Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

#167

Post by mikehotel »

zhouzhao wrote: post #128
kingnothing wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? You can easily encrypt your data before sending it for storage on on S3, for example.

You can encrypt them at rest, but data that lies encrypted and is never touched, is useless data. You need to decrypt them as well. Also, plenty of incompetent devops around, and writing a decryption toolchain can be difficult.

Decryption is not usually an issue if you encrypt locally.

Tools like Kopia, Borg and Restic handle this and also include deduplication and other advanced features.

Really no excuse for large orgs or even small businesses and somewhat tech literate public.

Re: Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

#169

Post by rini17 »

mrbluecoat wrote: post #11
Titan2189 wrote: post #6

Surely there must be something that's missing in translation? This feels like it simply can't be right.

I agree. No automated fire suppression system for critical infrastructure with no backup?

Battery fire is impossible to suppress.

Re: Fire destroys S. Korean government's cloud storage system, no backups available

#170

Post by vladms »

CamouflagedKiwi wrote: post #160
eCa wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree completely that it's absolute wild to run such a system without backups. But at this point no government should keep critical data on foreign cloud storage.

And yet here is an example where keeping critical data off public cloud storage has been significantly worse for them in the short term. Not that they should just go all in on it, but an encrypted copy on S3 or GCS would seem really useful right about now.

You can do a bad job with public or private cloud. What if they would have had the backup and lost the encryption key?

Cost wise probably having even a Korean different data center backup would not have been huge effort, but not doing it exposed them to a huge risk.

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