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Posted on April 6th, 2009 by Jon Honeyball
Dear Mr Ballmer, this won’t happen at your datacenter because…?
I’ve commented before about my feelings about the dangers of a headlong rush towards hosted services, especially those that are hosted abroad and thus can fall into the hands of any other country’s law enforcement agencies. Well, just to hammer home the point, take note of this message posted at http://sites.google.com/site/mnsclec/index
Dear Customers,
Today at 6:00am, the FBI conducted an unwarranted early morning raid of our 2323 Bryan Street Datacenters, on the 7th and 24th floors.
I received a phone call at 6:05am from our NOC that the entire network was powered off. I called Capstar Commercial and TELX, our landlord, and was told that the FBI was in the datacenter with a search and seizure warrant. I asked that the agent in charge call me immediately.
I received a call 15 minutes later from FBI Agent Allyn Lynd. Mr. Lynd would not tell me why he raided our datacenter or what he was looking for. He also accused me of hiding inside my house in Ovilla, Texas. I was actually in Phoenix, Arizona when this happened. I told him that, and he told me that he was “getting the dogs” after me, and hung up on me. I found out from an employee that there were 15 police cars and a SWAT team at my home in Ovilla.
The FBI has seized all equipment belonging to our customers. Many customers went to the data center to try and retrieve their equipment, but were threatened with arrest.
Neither I, nor Core IP are involved in any illegal activities of any kind. The only data that I have received thus far is that the FBI is investigating a company that has purchased services from Core IP in the past. This company does not even colocate with us anywhere, much less 2323 Bryan Street Datacenter.
Currently nearly 50 businesses are completely without access to their email and data. Citizen access to Emergency 911 services are being affected, as Core IP’s primary client base consists of telephone companies.
If you run a datacenter, please be aware that in our great country, the FBI can come into your place of business at any time and take whatever they want, with no reason.
I can be reached for further comment at: [removed by PC Pro]. Further information will be given as it becomes available.
Yours,
Matthew Simpson
CEO, Core IP Networks, LLC
Tags: core ip networks, fbi, hosted services
Posted in: Random
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6 Responses to “ Dear Mr Ballmer, this won’t happen at your datacenter because…? ”
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April 6th, 2009 at 11:11 am
I’ve been saying that cloud based hosting is bad for companies for this sort of reason, plus who owns the data, since it first appeared – even before, when Google Docs first appeared.
I can see the use of clouds for large companies, where they can spread the cloud among their satellite sites and internally hosted “Web” applications (an intranet version of Google Docs, for example), but shifting your company confidential data out into the cloud, without making sure you know where it is located and not having redundency still seems foolhardy to me.
For most sites I worked on, there were contingency plans to have a mobile data centre roll up and take over where the last offsite back-ups left off (i.e. max 8 hours loss of work) after “an aircraft hit the office” (actual scenario for a 1998 test of the disaster recovery plan!).
If your cloud is “siezed” and taken off-line, where do you start your disaster recovery from? Redundancy in the cloud is all well and good, but if all of the offices are hit simultaneously, you are still back at square one…
April 6th, 2009 at 12:44 pm
I remain astonished by the continued enthusiasm for off-shore data hosting. Many companies offering such services do not even state which countries they use for their data centres. By using such services you are exposing yourself to legal jeopardy in an often unknown jurisdiction and likely one you are not currently exposed to. It is particularly worrying that data is often held in the US, exposing you to an environment with very high legal costs, a complex overlapping system of local, state and federal laws and jurisdictions, rampant abuse of legal process by corporate entities and a legal system which shows scant respect for the human rights of non-US individuals or organisations.
These risks are compounded by the fact that your operations will be co-hosted with many other companies of unknown reliability. As in this case your activities and the integrity of your data may be compromised by possibly dodgy activities completely outside your control.
Given the ridiculously low cost of data storage hardware, are these process risks really worth running? It is hard enough to manage conformance and legal risks in the territories in which you seek to earn your profits without unnecessarily exposing your company to additional territories.
Far too much of the corporate world seems to think that simply by assuming globalisation it will become a fact. When you run into the law and politics you quickly come back down to base reality!
April 6th, 2009 at 1:20 pm
Storage, per se, isn’t the problem with Cloud Computing, more the applications uses to access the data and the scalability of those applications.
If you host a website through a cloud, if you have a sale and your hit rate goes from 200,000 hits a day to 250,000 hits an hour, you might need to lay on extra capacity, quickly. The amount of stored data is probably relatively small, but the amount of simultaneous accesses to that data is one of the reasons why cloud computing is attractive.
Also, if one cluster goes down, theoretically, another cluster somewhere “in the cloud” takes over. That is cheaper, on paper, than having a replicated data centre at another location.
The problem is the jurisdiction that covers the servers, as you rightly say. That could make for some very high “unforeseen” costs
April 6th, 2009 at 11:20 pm
ah but if only the people adopting the cloud model stuck tightly to your sector view, David! Fact is, sadly, they don’t. If you’re a small operation with a small groupware server hosted by a virtual services ISP, who are busted because smething else they do is illegal (or they don;t pay taxes), what are you gonna do next?
April 9th, 2009 at 8:28 am
Steve – we had this discussion back in 1997/98.. then its was network delivered applications (cannot recall the ‘buzz term’ then). Everyone gaga at the thought of running word/hyperion/sap from a server running at Sema, Gap Gemini, HP, etc. No one highlighted any pitfalls except the tech managers like me who pointed out that 2mb megastream links were expensive, and insufficient when you had upwards of 50, let alone1500 users… and what happened when the WAN, or the local exchange caught fire
April 12th, 2009 at 11:25 am
You’re thinking of Application Service providers, Alan. That’s V.07 or so of Cloud Computing, in as much as it wasn’t about moving your job to a place with some cheap MIPS, it was just about not having it inside your operation. ASP has found it’s niche, t seems, in ISP’s offering Managed Exchange Servers – an offer which so far seems to founder rather rapidly on the service record of the ISP, whenever I investigate it in my clients!