(C) Alec Muffett's DropSafe blog.
Author Name: Alec Muffett
This story was originally published on allecmuffett.com. [1]
License: CC-BY-SA 3.0.[2]


cloud – dropsafe

2021-11

A source pointed me to this, and it’s hilarious. I am not the greatest fan of French data protection regulator CNIL, and I can kinda see what they are trying to achieve, but it’s hilariously badly done in the way that I expect of them…

A few days ago there was a fire at French cloud provider OVH. They lost a datacenter, and then a few days later had something else go wrong with some (presumably: uninterruptible power supply) batteries in storage, leading to problems with smoke. Having experienced first-hand the ability of smoke alone to write-off a datacenter, either OVH have been very fortunate or very discreet regarding the latter.

And what has been the reaction of CNIL to this incident? Following the “fall of every sparrow” provisions of GDPR, they are reminding everyone that deletion of personal data is an offence under GDPR and that if any customer of OVH actually lost personal data in the incident, they must report it.

Image Google Translate, may not be well-translated with respect to the original.

Is this actually such a bad thing to do? I feel: no and yes.

It’s reasonable to make an argument that companies which use cloud providers should take care of the data which is entrusted to them, and that pursuit of that entails using reputable cloud providers which won’t drop all your data on the floor, lose it, leak it, be hacked, etc; and that this obligation will drive customers to choose reputable cloud providers.

On the other hand: at what point does a company get to lose a hard disk any more? The data is gone, in this case literally burned to the point of irrecoverability. Companies which lost data in the fire will take a hit — not their fault, even, other than to trust OVH — and the regulator wants to know about it. Why? What value are CNIL going to add to the situation?

Are they going to spank OVH’s customer base for choosing to use a French hosting provider?

I’ll bet it stings that the fire wasn’t at AWS.
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[1] URL: https://alecmuffett.com/article/tag/cloud
[2] URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

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