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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

#971

Post by boodleboodle »

bryanhogan wrote: post #618
sbinnee wrote: post #555

What a sad news as a Korean to see a post about Korea at the top of HN during one of the largest Korean holiday. I can share an anecdote how slow tech adoption is in Korea. It is not exactly about tech in public section but in private companies. I assume public section has slower adoption rate than private ones in general. Just about a year ago I had a couple of projects with insurance companies. I won't name them bu…

I think it's very interesting that Korea is probably the country with the fastest cultural adoption of new tech, e.g. #1 for ChatGPT, but on the other hand I can see as a web developer that new web tech is often adopteded at a very slow rate.

We excel at things that look good on paper.

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

#972

Post by TMWNN »

bink wrote: post #209
shakna wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft has already testified that the American government maintains access to their data centres, in all regions. It likely applies to all American cloud companies. America is not a stable ally, and has a history of spying on friends. So unless the whole of your backup is encrypted offline, and you trust the NSA to never break the encryption you chose, its a national security risk.

Not only does the NSA break encryption but they actually sabotage algorithms to make them easier to break when used.

DES is an example of where people were sure that NSA persuaded IBM to weaken it but, to quote Bruce Schneier, "It took the academic community two decades to figure out that the NSA 'tweaks' actually improved the security of DES". https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/saluting-the-data-encrypti...>

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

#973

Post by [deleted] »

tooltalk wrote: post #654
thanatos519 wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Backups should be far away, too. Apparently some companies lost everything on 9/11 because their backups were in the other tower.

Some foolishly believed that the twin towers were invincible after the 1993 WTC bombing. Before 9/11, most DR (disaster recovery) sites were in Jersey City, NJ just across the river from their main offices in WFC or WTC, or roughly 3-5 miles away. After 9/11, the financial industry adopted a 50+ miles rule.

[deleted]

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

#974

Post by ylee »

tooltalk wrote: post #654
thanatos519 wrote: post #626

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Backups should be far away, too. Apparently some companies lost everything on 9/11 because their backups were in the other tower.

Some foolishly believed that the twin towers were invincible after the 1993 WTC bombing. Before 9/11, most DR (disaster recovery) sites were in Jersey City, NJ just across the river from their main offices in WFC or WTC, or roughly 3-5 miles away. After 9/11, the financial industry adopted a 50+ miles rule.

>Some foolishly believed that the twin towers were invincible after the 1993 WTC bombing.

I was told right after the bombing, by someone with a large engineering firm (Schlumberger or Bechtel), that the bombers could have brought the building down had they done it right.

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

#975

Post by bigtones »

robocat wrote: post #722
zestyping wrote: post #680

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is incredible. Government telling me how to backup my data. Incredible. No more incredible than the government telling you that you need liability insurance in order to drive a car. Do you think that is justifiable?

> liability insurance in order to drive a car. Do you think that is justifiable? New Zealand doesn't require car insurance, and I presume there are other countries with governments that that don't either. I suspect most people in NZ would only have a sketchy idea of what liability is, based on learning from US TV shows.

Australia is the same. Its part of the car registration cost annually.

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

#976

Post by admiralrohan »

rstuart4133 wrote: post #692
admiralrohan wrote: post #655

Is there any solution to these kind of issues other than having multiple backups and praying that not all of them will caught fire at the same time?

Backups are best thought of as a multi dimensional problem, as in, they can be connected in many dimensions. Destroy a backup, and all those in the same dimension are also destroyed. This means you must have to have redundancy in many dimensions. That all sounds a bit abstract, so ... One dimension is two backups can be close in space (ie, physically close, as happened here). Ergo backups must be physically separated…

Interesting way to explain this through multiple dimensions angle.

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

#977

Post by dv_dt »

qzw wrote: post #786
stego-tech wrote: post #773

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Speaking specifically from the IT side of things, an employer or customer refusing to do backups is the biggest red flag I can get, an immediate warning to run the fuck away before you get blamed for their failure, stego-tech kind of situation. That being said, I can likely guess where this ends up going: * Current IT staff and management are almost certainly scapegoated for “allowing this to happen”, despite t…

I abhor the general trend of governments outsourcing everything to private companies, but in this case, a technologically advanced country’s central government couldn’t even muster up the most basic of IT practices, and as you said, accountability will likely not rest with the people actually responsible for this debacle. Even a nefarious cloud services CEO couldn’t dream up a better sales case for the wholesale outs…

One co-effects of the outsourcing strategy is to underfund internal tech teams.. which then makes them less effective in both competing against and managing outsourced capabilities.

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

#979

Post by FinnKuhn »

vntok wrote: post #411
FinnKuhn wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it wasn't it most certainly is now

Why, there's nothing left to backup?

I suspect that they rebuild the system. Arguing against backups after that will be next to impossible.

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

#980

Post by TheNewsIsHere »

qzw wrote: post #786
stego-tech wrote: post #773

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. Speaking specifically from the IT side of things, an employer or customer refusing to do backups is the biggest red flag I can get, an immediate warning to run the fuck away before you get blamed for their failure, stego-tech kind of situation. That being said, I can likely guess where this ends up going: * Current IT staff and management are almost certainly scapegoated for “allowing this to happen”, despite t…

I abhor the general trend of governments outsourcing everything to private companies, but in this case, a technologically advanced country’s central government couldn’t even muster up the most basic of IT practices, and as you said, accountability will likely not rest with the people actually responsible for this debacle. Even a nefarious cloud services CEO couldn’t dream up a better sales case for the wholesale outs…

Aside from data sovereignty concerns, I think the best rebuttal to that would be to point out that every major provider contractually disclaims liability for maintaining backups.

Now, sure, there is AWS Backup and Microsoft 365 Backup. Nevertheless, those are backups in the same logical environment.

If you’re a central government, you still need to be maintaining an independent and basically functional backup that you control.

I own a small business of three people and we still run Veeam for 365 and keep backups in multiple clouds, multiple regions, and on disparate hardware.

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