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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

#211

Post by themafia »

Johnny555 wrote: post #196
forinti wrote: post #168

What structure could possibly preclude backups? I've never seen anything that couldn't be copied elsewhere. Maybe it was just convenient to have the possibility of losing everything.

I think that alluded to that earlier in the article: >However, due to the system’s large-capacity, low-performance storage structure, no external backups were maintained — meaning all data has been permanently lost. I think they decided that their storage was too slow to allow backups? Seems hard to believe that they couldn't manage any backups... other sources said they had around 900TB of storage. An LTO-9 tape dri…

Too slow to allow batched backups. Which means you should just make redundant copies at the time of the initial save. Encrypt a copy and send it offsite immediately.

If your storage performance is low then you don't need fat pipes to your external provider either.

They either built this too quickly or there was too much industry corruption perverting the process and the government bought an off the shelf solution that was inadequate for their actual needs.

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

#212

Post by manquer »

crazygringo wrote: post #166
stogot wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The problem is money,

you are seeing the local storage decision under the lens of security, that is not the real reason for this type of decision.

While it may have been sold that way, reality is more likely the local DC companies just lobbied for it to be kept local and cut as many corners as they needed. Both the fire and architecture show they did cut deeply.

Now why would a local company voluntary cut down its share of the pie by suggesting to backup store in a foreign country. They are going to suggest keep in country or worse as was done here literally the same facility and save/make even more !

The civil service would also prefer everything local either for nationalistic /economic reasons or if corrupt then for all kick backs each step of the way, first for the contract, next for the building permits, utilities and so on.

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

#213

Post by deaddodo »

OvbiousError wrote: post #198
crazygringo wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Enemy country in the current geopolitical climate is an interesting take. Doesn't sound like a great idea to me tbh.

There are a lot of gray relations out there, but there’s almost no way you could morph the current US/SK relations to one of hostility; beyond a negligible minority of citizens in either being super vocal for some perceived slights.

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

#214

Post by bmandale »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #189
Frost1x wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having just visited South Korea last year, one thing that sort of caught me off guard was the lack of Google Maps or other major direction system. I wasn’t aware but turns out anything considered “detailed mapping” infrastructure has to be ran stored and on South Korean soil, probably lots of other requirements. So you’re stuck with some shotty local mapping systems that are just bad. There may be a point in time it…

Several other countries have similar requirements with regards to storing and serving maps locally. If you take a moment to think about it, what's weird is that so many countries have simply resorted to relying on Google Maps for everyday mapping and navigation needs. This has become such a necessity nowadays that relying on a foreign private corporation for it sounds like a liability.

OSM is competitive with google maps in most places. Even if a person uses google maps, its inaccurate to say they "rely" on it when they could fail over to osm if google maps went down.

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

#215

Post by Avamander »

WhyNotHugo wrote: post #189
Frost1x wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having just visited South Korea last year, one thing that sort of caught me off guard was the lack of Google Maps or other major direction system. I wasn’t aware but turns out anything considered “detailed mapping” infrastructure has to be ran stored and on South Korean soil, probably lots of other requirements. So you’re stuck with some shotty local mapping systems that are just bad. There may be a point in time it…

Several other countries have similar requirements with regards to storing and serving maps locally. If you take a moment to think about it, what's weird is that so many countries have simply resorted to relying on Google Maps for everyday mapping and navigation needs. This has become such a necessity nowadays that relying on a foreign private corporation for it sounds like a liability.

Local mapping efforts and allowing Google Maps to operate aren't mutually exclusive though. I don't see how it's weird that people can choose which map app they use.

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

#216

Post by nullable_bool »

I like to think that at least one worker was loafing on a project that was due the next day and there was no way it was going to get done. Their job was riding on it. They got drunk to embrace the doom that faces them, only to wake up with this news. Free to loaf another day!

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

#219

Post by alephnerd »

neom wrote: post #131
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.

Good thing Korea has cloud providers, apparently Kakao has even gone...beyond the cloud! https://kakaocloud.com/ https://www.nhncloud.com/ https://cloud.kt.com/ To name a few.

They are overwhelmingly whitelabeled providers. For example, Samsung SDI Cloud (the largest "Korean" cloud) is an AWS white label.

Korea is great at a lot of engineering disciplines. Sadly, software is not one of them, though it's slowly changing. There was a similar issue a couple years ago where the government's internal intranet was down a couple days because someone deployed a switch in front of outbound connections without anyone noticing.

It's not a talent problem but a management problem - similar to Japan's issues, which is unsurprising as Korean institutions and organizations are heavily based on Japanese ones from back in the JETRO era.

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