Too busy to think Data

This week we failed to help a friend in need.  He'd left a single copy of those everso valuable baby photos on his Laptop and failed to back it up.  I really feel for him.  Despite a platter change and a huge amount of effort it was too late.  Technically it's possible to recover data from mechanically damaged platters but sadly baby photos don't justify the cost.

These days we have free Cloud services thrown at us from multiple providers however most corporations quite rightly prevent or block them as they can lead to uncontrolled business data leaking in to private cloud space.  It's easy to do if not controlled.

In the past we have found extremely sensitive data on discarded "home computers".  I remember the launch sequence of a missile system being one!  One can imagine an under pressure worker bringing home some important work to finish off over night, probably on an uncontrolled USB stick and copying it on to his home PC.  That's two uncontrolled copies before we consider factors such as the cloud.

In my friend's example however it's the opposite.  He works for a company who manage their data very carefully.  Whilst he's obviously been able to copy his personal data to the device it's excluded from his normal business data and so it's not backed up.  All hard disks will fail at some point so this is a time bomb. 

My point is that due to human nature we fail to consider the implications of our data actions.  We just assume it will be there when we need it and not there when we need it gone.  But this is very often not the case and is always a rash assumption. 

Just like a warehousing error is very often in fact two errors; 1) where something should be and 2) where it actually is... we have the same consideration with data.  We must consider BOTH where we want data to be and where we do not want data to be.

What The Cloud does is enables the data to be in a dozen places at once without us thinking about it.  Yet that's exactly what we need to do.  Think about it.