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AWS says it can't restore some data from mideast facilities struck by Iran

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Re: AWS says it can't restore some data from mideast facilities struck by Iran

#161

Post by mitxela »

bigiain wrote: post #144
kibwen wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For long-term backups you want offline cold storage in an underground facility in a friendly jurisdiction, not a datacenter.

We've beer-o-clock wargamed this a bit. If I had an "important enough" client, I think I'd store all out local (Sydney + Melbourne AWS cross region) data to AWS Singapore (to protect against Australian jurisdictional and political risks) and to a non AWS cloud provider in the EU somewhere. I reckon thatd be close to as resilient a pile of hard drives in an underground bunker, for significantly less setup and ongoing…

More likely than the network going down is you getting banned from the network because someone thought you were selling porn.

Re: AWS says it can't restore some data from mideast facilities struck by Iran

#162

Post by mitxela »

jeltz wrote: post #139
nradov wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In US courts you can sue anyone for anything but you might not win. The US government has sovereign immunity from most civil liability. As for the legal system in Bahrain I have no idea but hypothetically even if Amazon could somehow win a judgment they wouldn't be able to collect.

Why wouldn't they be able to collect? As long as Amazon does business in a country the legal system in that country can collect.

How would the Bahrain legal system force the USA to pay reparations for the war it started? Seize all US assets, the way we did with Russia?

Re: AWS says it can't restore some data from mideast facilities struck by Iran

#163

Post by [deleted] »

mitxela wrote: post #148
dannyobrien wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, I'm from the past. When countries in the 2010s -- especially Western countries -- started seeing data residency requirements as an acceptable aspect of national policies, as opposed to a weird authoritarian thing that only China and Russia imposed on their citizens, we[1] spent a bunch of time explaining to their lawmakers that having geographical redundancy was a good thing, actually, and that you should stop in…

Is there not more than one data center in your country? Is the power feed at your office too small to put a computer there?

[deleted]

Re: AWS says it can't restore some data from mideast facilities struck by Iran

#164

Post by dannyobrien »

mitxela wrote: post #148
dannyobrien wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, I'm from the past. When countries in the 2010s -- especially Western countries -- started seeing data residency requirements as an acceptable aspect of national policies, as opposed to a weird authoritarian thing that only China and Russia imposed on their citizens, we[1] spent a bunch of time explaining to their lawmakers that having geographical redundancy was a good thing, actually, and that you should stop in…

Is there not more than one data center in your country? Is the power feed at your office too small to put a computer there?

I think both of these things are (very) often true, but it is also true that if I'm going to have backups, it is (all other things being equal) better to minimize correlated risk. The assumption in a lot of these conversations is that having the data "in one place" (ie inside a country) was "safer" than having it in "somewhere else". The tougher counterintuitive argument was that it can be safer to have data stored in multiple places, for some risk assessments -- and that for others, having data close by was less important, in the case of seizure or surveillance or illegal use, than who had legal or effective access to that data.

Re: AWS says it can't restore some data from mideast facilities struck by Iran

#165

Post by kjs3 »

dannyobrien wrote: post #146
kjs3 wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and start talking about where administrative access and encryption keys lived Yeah, that was/is just another problem. Considering how that was actually handled in the real world before data residency laws came into force, I'm glad 'we' didn't convince those countries to put their citizens data at risk.

I'm not sure you were disagreeing with (past) me; but if you were, could you expand on your point?

I'm disagreeing with you. I in the before time, I had all sorts of conversations around this topic with any number of cloud providers that were like:

Us: We are concerned about our citizens (US) data, how are you managing the databases. Clout Provider (CP): They are only managed by fully background check employees. Us: Yeah, but where are they? What is their citizenship? CP: Um...mostly Eastern Europe. Lots in RU. (another CP proudly said "they're pretty much all in China...for cost containment"). Us: ...

Us: We are concerned about our citizens (EU) data, how are you managing encryption? CP: Everything is perfectly encrypted with hardware HSMs and all the FIPS and stuff. Us: So...where are the folks who run the HSMs? CP: Um...mostly SV. Some in the EU. Us: But can you assemble a quorum of US citizens for the HSM? CP: Of course! Us: ...

And on and on. Not to put too fine a point on it, many of us have no faith that vendors self policing international data protection in the face of government level pressure on companies and employees would work. Not that it can't, I don't think it would.

Re: AWS says it can't restore some data from mideast facilities struck by Iran

#166

Post by mitxela »

gleezard wrote: post #44
knorker wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's you point? That if you had run your own DC in that region (because that was your business requirement) then you'd have better missile defense than AWS? Or maybe AWS or DIY, you are always responsible for geographic diversity? Anyone losing data over this lost it because they'd literally told AWS to only store it in one place.

[flagged]

Can't, not invited

Re: AWS says it can't restore some data from mideast facilities struck by Iran

#167

Post by SoftTalker »

chasd00 wrote: post #74
rbanffy wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more dramatic contingency you have to plan for, the more expensive the plan gets. Earlier this week I mentioned that if we lose enough data centres to bring our operation down, the first items in the to-do list becomes securing weapons, vehicles and fuel.

> to-do list becomes securing weapons, vehicles and fuel. I toured a datacenter once back in the early 2000s and they showed me 30 days of generator fuel storage. When i asked them why 30 days and not 35 they replied "we're such a major customer of both electricity and fuel that if we don't get electricity or fuel for 30 days there's way bigger problems than your website not being online" hah.

You also need to understand whether the generator backup actually runs everything. Where I work it doesn't. Only "essential" systems get backup power.

And if the data center is more than about 5 years old it almost certainly was not planned with adequate backup power to run racks of GPUs.

Re: AWS says it can't restore some data from mideast facilities struck by Iran

#168

Post by wand3r »

dannyobrien wrote: post #122
rishikeshs wrote: post #41

I think this is due to the data residency requirements in UAE. I'm working with a client in the health space and the government requirements requires me to store data only in UAE! Tried with AWS but they were not allowing any new instances and I had to go with Azure.

Hi, I'm from the past. When countries in the 2010s -- especially Western countries -- started seeing data residency requirements as an acceptable aspect of national policies, as opposed to a weird authoritarian thing that only China and Russia imposed on their citizens, we[1] spent a bunch of time explaining to their lawmakers that having geographical redundancy was a good thing, actually, and that you should stop in…

This is a very engineer-centric view. I studied economics in school, so an analogy in that realm is ironically how all countries should specialize and raise the PPC curve. The reality of the situation was that in 2010 not many people understood how powerful big data actually was. Data sovereignty is actually quite logical when you consider the scale and power of not only the company, but the US as a whole. I can assure you that lawmakers were not thinking about efficient disaster recovery plans or back ups when they made the laws. You can also create reasonably diversified data silos within a country.

As an aside, it is quite crazy the world we live in. I am with the majority where I expected Amazon to be more redundant, but I still marvel at the assumption that a US dev can spin up multiple redundant and data sovereign servers in dozens of countries with efficient caching, failover and redundancy (enough to survive an earthquake or targeted missile attack) from their own home. Even a few hours of outage in a foreign country is considered unacceptable.

Re: AWS says it can't restore some data from mideast facilities struck by Iran

#169

Post by dzonga »

bdangubic wrote: post #103
sparkling wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He forgot to add "if it's Multi-AZ" ;)

multi-AZ doesn’t help against multi-AZ drones :)

black swan events.

this is one of one of those things - were in the current era either a cloud provider should provide automatic backups in another geographic zone.

if you're in us-east, then your back-ups should ideally be in eu-west + africa for redundancy.

Re: AWS says it can't restore some data from mideast facilities struck by Iran

#170

Post by boelboel »

dzonga wrote: post #169
bdangubic wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

multi-AZ doesn’t help against multi-AZ drones :)

black swan events. this is one of one of those things - were in the current era either a cloud provider should provide automatic backups in another geographic zone. if you're in us-east, then your back-ups should ideally be in eu-west + africa for redundancy.

It's not really a black swan event just an unlikely one. If it were one it would not have been something people talked about before.
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