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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

#231
post #93

I wonder how many IT professionals were begging some incompetent upper management official to do this the right way, but were ignored daily. You'd think there would be concrete policies to prevent these things...

If I worked there I'd have had a hard time believing there were really no backups. Governments can be very nebulous.

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

#232
Well I'll be. Backup is a discipline to not be taken lightly by any organization, specially a government. Fire? This is backup 101: files should be backed up and copies should be physically apart to avoid losing data.

There are some in this threading pointing out that this would be handled by cloud providers. That bad - you can't hope for transparent backup, you need to actively have a discipline over it.

My fear is that our profession has become very amateurish over the past decade and a lot of people are vulnerable to this kind of threat.

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

#233
post #159
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.

Encrypted backups would have saved a lot of pain here

[deleted]

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

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's the government of South Korea, which has a nearly 2 trillion dollar GDP. Surely they could have built a few more data centers connected with their own fiber if they were that paranoid about it.

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

#235
One of the workers jumped off a building. [1] They say the person was not being investigated for the incident. But I can’t help but think he was a put under intense pressure to be scapegoat for how fucked up Korea can be in situations like this.

To be some context on Korea IT scene, you get pretty good pay and benefits if you work for a big product company, but will be treated like dogshit inside subcontracting hell if you work anywhere else.

[1] https://www.hani.co.kr/arti/society/society_general/1222145....

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

#236
post #205

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.

From the perspective of securing your data, what's the practical difference between a second country and an enemy country? None. Even if it's encrypted data, all encryption can be broken, and so we must assume it will be broken. Sensitive data shouldn't touch outside systems, period, no matter what encryption.

Any even remotely proper symmetric encryption scheme "can be broken" but only if you have a theoretical adversary with nearly infinite power and time, which is in practice absolutely utterly impossible.

I'm sure cryptographers would love to know what makes it possible for you to assume that say AES-256 or AES-512 can be broken in practice for you to include it in your risk assessment.

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

#237

I was smirking at this until I remembered that I have just one USB stick as my 'backup'. And that was made a long time ago. Recently I have been thinking about whether we actually need governments, nation states and all of the hubris that goes with it such as new media. Technically this means 'anarchism' with everyone running riot and chaos. But, that is just a big fear, however, the more I think through the 'no gove…

Government is whatever has a monopoly on violence in the area you happen to live. Maybe it’s the South Korean government. Maybe it’s a guy down the street. Whatever the case, it’ll be there.

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

#239
post #131
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.

Samsung owns Joyent

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

#240

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 issue here is not refusing to use a foreign third party. That makes sense.

The issue is mandating the use of remote storage and not backing it up. That’s insane. It’s like the most basic amount of preparation you do. It’s recommended to even the smallest of companies specifically because a fire is a risk.

That’s gross mismanagement.

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