Megaupload raid underlines cloud risks

January’s big local technology story was the police raid on Kim Dotcom’s Coatesville mansion. Dotcom and his colleagues were arrested because of allegations the Megaupload cloud storage service he ran was a piracy operation.
There’s no doubt some people used the service to swap movies and music files. Yet Megaupload was also a low-cost way of legitimately sharing files and a cheap place for making online backups. It was a basic cloud storage facility.
Megaupload’s legitimate business didn’t stop the US authorities shutting the service without warning. Sudden closure left businesses unable to access their documents.
This highlights one of the biggest questions facing cloud storage users: what happens when a service goes offline? The simple answer is, “you’re in trouble”. Megaupload may be restarted in the future, but for now it looks as if its data will stay out of reach.
Of course, you could argue anyone storing valuable data on Megaupload’s servers only has themselves to blame. Cloud computing advocates repeatedly tell potential customers to find reputable service providers. And anyone putting important data online should make local backups and, possibly, use more than one remote service to guard against this kind of event.
Megaupload always looked risky. The company’s branding and the behaviour of its owner did little to reassure users their data was in safe hands. A user doing due diligence would have placed their business elsewhere.
Alternative services like Dropbox, SkyDrive and Amazon are respectable businesses, unlikely to be on the receiving end of heavy-handed action from US authorities chasing piracy.
Megaupload’s closure should come as a warning about how to use cloud services more than whether to use the cloud. The lesson is to not trust a single technology or service provider.