There have been written a lot about Megaupload shutdown, most of articles related with ethics and with piracy in Internet, however, there are some consecuences of the shutdown that can be useful from a Business Continuity perspective: the cloud service that Megaupload delivered.
There were a lot of users that stored information in Megaupload as an alternative site to backup their data and in some cases even as a primary site. In my past post Home Continuity it was described this kind of cloud services, like Youtube, Picassa or Dropbox, were a good solution to backup data. However, Megaupload experience make us think about the election of the cloud service provider if the information that we're going to store is relevant. In the worst scenario, this information can disappear.
Carried to the business, perhaps we can think that is complicated that a cloud service provider stop delivering their services and, if this occurs, we can continue with old provider until we find a new one. But, I suggest to every company to review the agreement they have with cloud service providers to check it this agreement really give you right in circumstances like a legal shutdown or a company bankruptcy. In this line, we can see the example of Spanir, if one of this circumstances occurs, the less important are customers, because they have not to maintain a good branch, and in a company in bankruptcy the last collective receiving compensations are customers. Customers for AirMadrid are still waiting to be payed 5 years after.
About Spanair, we can make a final thought: I don't know if the bankruptcy has been produced by business criteria, because of profit and loos balance, or perhaps the company has been extremely injured by the plane crash in 2008, but what is cleare is that there have been a deficient business management. For a lot of Spanair providers it will be a domino effect and they are going to be forced to stop their activities.
From a BC perspective the question is, Can we include a scenario in which our main customers goes bust?
