Greetings List, from a poster-turned lurker-turned recidivist poster.

A quick background (reprise), for those whose acquaintance I haven't made:  I am a fifteen-year veteran of the Document Imaging->ECM->RIM progression, with a heavy background in technology (programming/architecture).  I currently work out of NYC as a RIM consultant for a New England region IT services provider. I'm also very active at my local ARMA chapter level (Metro NYC), currently serving on the Board as Vice- President, Professional Development.

Now, my 2 cents on this pesky Amazon outage topic:

That image we're used to seeing in PowerPoints of a happy little cloud that hovers over your business and graciously accepts and retrieves your data is really nothing more than a marketing gimmick courtesy of a nascent industry selling an idea.  Of course the reality of implementing and using that idea is much more complex, as with any product or service that we're sold on a daily basis.

The paradigm behind data protection and availability in the cloud is not any different than in conventional computing:  Just as the single hard drive becomes a RAID array; as the RAID array becomes a mirrored (or virtualized) machine; a machine becomes a data center, etc…the idea remains that you must plan for failure.  Repeat:  you must plan for failure.

Here's a great blog entry that drives this point home from a big Amazon customer who came through the outage relatively unscathed:

http://smu.gs/hEEryq

We can all take a page from their playbook in planning for the protection and availability our content/records systems, whether in the cloud or otherwise.



Best Regards,


Eugene Stakhov, CRM, CDIA+
[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
909-CRM-GENE
Twitter: @crmgene

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