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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

#171

Post by sudo_and_pray »

rvba wrote: post #119
yongjik wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's even worse. According to other articles [1], the total data of "G drive" was 858 TB. It's almost farcical to calculate, but AWS S3 has pricing of about $0.023/GB/month, which means the South Korean government could have reliable multi-storage backup of the whole data at about $20k/month. Or about $900/month if they opted for "Glacier deep archive" tier ($0.00099/GB/month). They did have backup of the data ... in…

How does this even make sense business wise for AWS? Is their cost per unit so low?

This is just the storage cost. That is they will keep your data on their servers, nothing more.

Now if you want to do something with the data, that's where you need to hold your wallet. Either you get their compute ($$$ for Amazon) or you send it to your data centre (egress means $$$ for Amazon).

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

#172

Post by littlestymaar »

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…

> The government official who insisted that commercial AWS/GCP/Azure couldn't possibly be trusted with keeping the information

They were still right though: it's absolutely clear without an ounce of doubt that whatever you put on an US cloud is being accessible by the US government, who can also decide to sanction you and deprive you from your ability to access the data yourself.

Not having backups is entirely retarded, but also completely orthogonal.

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

#173

Post by cthalupa »

aorloff wrote: post #78

Theoretically, they still have the primary copies (on each individual person's "cloud-enabled" device).

> The Ministry of the Interior and Safety also issued guidelines to each ministry stating, “All work materials should not be stored on office PCs but should be stored on the G-Drive.”

They very well might have only been saving to this storage system. It was probably mapped as a drive or shared folder on the PC.

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

#174

Post by oceansky »

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.

They can take the data hostage, the foreign nation would have no recourse.

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

#175

Post by hosh »

politelemon wrote: post #154
zwnow wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rightfully did not trust these companies. Sure what happened is a disaster for them, but you cant simply trust Amazon & Microsoft.

S3 features have saved our bacon a number of times. Perhaps your experience and usage is different. They are worth trusting with business critical data as long as you're following their guidance. GCP though have not proven it, their data loss news is still fresh in my mind.

Were you talking about this incidence? https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/google-cloud-acciden...

I am currently evaluating between GCP and AWS right now.

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

#176

Post by crazygringo »

aorloff wrote: post #78

Theoretically, they still have the primary copies (on each individual person's "cloud-enabled" device).

Do they? It's not clear if this was two-way sync or access on-demand.

Like, I use Google Drive for Desktop but it only downloads the files I access. If I don't touch a file for a few days it's removed from my local cache.

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

#178

Post by mikehotel »

DarkmSparks wrote: post #164
kspacewalk2 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If your threat model includes the TLA types, then backup to a physical server you control in a location geographically isolated from your main location. Or to a local set of drives that you physically rotate to remote locations.

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

#179

Post by oceansky »

rini17 wrote: post #169
mrbluecoat wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Battery fire is impossible to suppress.

Much harder, but not impossible.

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

#180

Post by littlestymaar »

kspacewalk2 wrote: post #157
miken123 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because these companies never lose data, like during some lightning strikes, oh wait: https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-33989384 As a government you should not be putting your stuff in an environment under control of some other nation, period. That is a completely different issue and does not really relate to making backups.

>As a government you should not be putting your stuff in an environment under control of some other nation, period. Why? If you encrypt it yourself before transfer, the only possible control some_other_nation will have over you or your data is availability.

First of all, you cannot do much if you keep all the data encrypted on the cloud (basically just backing things up, and hope you don't have to fetch it given the egress cost). Also, availability is exactly the kind of issue that a fire cause…
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