Can small users recover from the cloud?

Abstract

Large numbers of small organisations and prosumers have shifted away from managing data on their own devices and are now heavily reliant on service-providers for both storage and processing of their data. Most such entities are also dependent on those service-providers to perform backups and enable data recovery. Prior work defining users' backup needs was applied to this context in order to establish specifications for appropriate backup arrangements. A sample of service-providers was assessed against those specifications. Their backup and recovery mechanisms were found to fall seriously short of the need.