What happens to data when your cloud provider evaporates?

There's no way to directly migrate data between service providers

Computerworld - Over the past year, four cloud storage service providers have said they're shutting down and Amazon's cloud services have been problematic since Thursday.

"All of these things are coming together ... to give cloud storage providers a black eye. Anyone who was on the fence about cloud storage may be off of it by now," said Gartner research analyst Adam Couture.

More importantly, the closures and outages leave users with an important question: What happens to their data when the cloud they use evaporates?

Currently, there's no way for a cloud storage service provider to directly migrate customer data to another provider. If a service goes down, the hosting company must return the data to its customer, who then must find another provider or revert back to storing it locally, according to Arun Taneja, principal analyst at The Taneja Group.     Read More