Tuesday, October 25, 2011

Have an "Exit Plan"

Although this is sort of IT 101, build an idea of what it looks like to shut down an application that you either built or are using as a service.  This should include things like migration of your data, and how you scrub important business data from the vendor's servers.  This article by Paul Venezia of InfoWorld explains the implications of exiting and how one IT group ensures their data has been removed from a providers servers.  I don't think the author goes far enough because there are most likely backups of your data on remote servers and possibly tape.  You should already know what your provider's retention policy is and what form these backups are kept.  If you have stand-by servers in another data center, you may want to perform a wipe on those disks as well before the storage space is released to other customers.  I'll assume that the backups on tape will eventually be destroyed and if you've actually implemented with this provider, that you are OK with their security policies that control access to backup media and their disposal procedures. 



See Also

Some of my previous articles on cloud computing.

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