Saying Your Data Is “In The Cloud” Is No Longer a Good Enough Answer

Do you even know where your data really is? Saying your data is “in the cloud” is no longer a good enough answer.

Just last month, South Korea’s government got a brutal reminder of why good data management is so important: a fire at a government data center destroyed 858 terabytes of data, and one critical system had zero backups. The resulting fallout crippled government email systems, online petition services, emergency dispatch, tax and social services, and more. Reports indicate that approximately 17% of central government officials were affected in terms of data scope, which represents hundreds of thousands of individuals and years of work lost

Why did it go so disastrously wrong? Why did one of the government’s flagship systems have no separate backup? Authorities reportedly said it couldn’t support a backup solution given its “large capacity.” That excuse, in 2025, is both shocking and dangerously inadequate.

Losing data doesn’t always require a dramatic event like a fire; backup failures can be subtle and happen for many reasons. Hardware failures—such as issues with disks, controllers, or storage arrays—can compromise data integrity. Cyberattacks and ransomware may result in the encryption, deletion, or corruption of both your primary data and backups. Human error, including accidental deletion, misconfiguration, or overwriting files, is another common culprit. Outages at your provider or within a specific region can affect cloud services, highlighting that even cloud storage is vulnerable to disruptions. Lastly, natural disasters—such as fires, floods, or earthquakes—can lead to site-level destruction and data loss.

In fact, just today Amazon Web Services (AWS) suffered a major outage that disrupted services globally, affecting Snapchat, Ring, platforms like Slack, and dozens of business SaaS products. The root cause? A Domain Name System (DNS) subsystem failure in AWS’s key US-East-1 region. That kind of outage ripples through dependencies, even if your data is safe, services you rely on may go dark.

These recent events underscore a simple truth:

Cloud = Convenience, Not Invulnerability.

When backups are simply assumed to be available the consequences can extend far beyond mere data loss. Organizations risk costly downtime and lost revenue, suffer damage to their reputation and erosion of customer trust, and face compliance, legal, and regulatory challenges related to data retention or breach obligations. Unexpected recovery expenses, such as emergency restores, consultants, and replacement hardware, can also arise, while business continuity may be jeopardized if operations cannot quickly resume. No competent digital operation can afford to rely on hope; backups must be thoughtfully designed, rigorously tested, redundant, and continuously monitored to ensure true protection.

Redundancy must be diverse, not just more of the same. Backups should sit on different infrastructure, with separate failure domains. The failures of large cloud service providers like AWS goes to show you can’t trust a single provider. Backups must be architected, monitored, owned. They can’t be an afterthought assigned to “IT” and forgotten.

At InfoPathways, we help businesses take the guesswork out of data protection. Our team designs and manages customized backup and recovery solutions that go beyond basic cloud storage—layering on-site, off-site, and cloud redundancy for true resilience. We continuously monitor system health, validate backup integrity, and implement disaster recovery plans tailored to your operational and compliance needs.

Contact us to learn more.