Why we don’t always suggest cloud services

Today I was forwarded a story from a friend. This is one of those that really makes you think about cloud services. A staff person from a software company with roughly 100-150 employees was pulling a joke on a friend and because of his actions the company he works for lost access to their files and emails for over three days. So to start a guy like to play jokes on his friend. His friend is an app developer on the android framework and had just released an app. The guy purchases the app and make a copy of it and then immediately refunds the app. THen he messages his friends with a copy of his own apps saying look what I got online for free. Pretty lame joke but for a techie it is kinda funny. But this does break google’s terms of agreement with the guy pulling the prank.

So google bans the access that this guy has to his account. He can log in but is not allowed to do anything. The only issue is that his account is a company account so google banned access to all the accounts in that domain. (ie, The entire company) That means the staff can no longer access their google drive account and can’t access their documents on the cloud. To make matters worse anyone that used their personal google account to be the recovery email for their company account also got banned for their personal account. Which mean mothers could not get notifications from their schools and it interferred with peoples personal business.

Now dont get me wrong, if you do bad things on gmail or other google mail services I want them to ban you, but to ban the entire company makes for a completely different thing. Also their IT department has been unable to get anyone from google to help since they were banned for breaking the Terms of Agreement. So here is what we at YCS can take from this story… First if you ever use a cloud service you should still retain the acess to your files or a backup of those files no matter what. If you use a cloud service for email be sure that you use a service that will not punish all accounts for the actions of one. Microsoft 365 exchange for example will only stop the account that is causing the problem and not the entire domain.

So what do we suggest. If you are going to use a cloud based service just be sure you have a backup of your files somewhere else. Even if you use a syning service like dropbox it is always a good idea to have a backup of those same files with a different company or on your own hardware. Nothing beats having your stuff on your own hardware. We run email on our servers as well. But if you decide to use YCS email services or MS exchange or any other service just ask your IT professional to go over the differences and ask for suggestions. We are always able to provide answers to your questions and help design a good IT infrustructure for your business that will have redunant ways to get to your data just in case something were to fail. You can reach one of our techs at 407-826-0810.