When the Cloud Catches Fire: A Masterclass in How Not to Manage IT
- Rich Washburn
- Oct 21
- 3 min read
There’s a telltale way to know your IT leadership isn’t qualified.And it’s not when a system goes down, or a server crashes, or a backup takes a little longer than expected. It’s when best practices are treated like optional guidelines instead of gospel. Because best practices aren’t suggestions — they’re guardrails. Ignore them long enough, and you’ll end up where South Korea’s government did last month: standing in front of 858 terabytes of smoldering digital rubble wondering what the hell just happened.
Let’s rewind.
Late last month, a fire tore through the National Information Resources Service (NIRS) data center in Daejeon, South Korea — home to G-Drive (no, not that G-Drive), the central government cloud platform used by 125,000 employees. The blaze took out 96 systems and, with them, eight years’ worth of government data. Gone. Irrecoverable. Not because of hackers or cosmic rays — but because there were no backups.
Let me repeat that:A national cloud service. For 125,000 government officials. With zero backups.
That’s not just a misstep. That’s malpractice.
The Curtain, the Tequila, and the Fifth Burner
You ever walk into a kitchen and see someone trying to flambé under the drapes, with a bottle of tequila in one hand and a lighter in the other — and think, “This can’t end well”? That’s what this was, but for data infrastructure.
The Ministry of the Interior had instructed employees to store everything in G-Drive, centralizing data (great idea), but apparently didn’t require redundant storage (terrible execution). When the fire hit, the only systems spared were the ones physically located on another floor. That’s not strategy — that’s dumb luck in a server rack.
The Real Lesson: Best Practices Exist Because Somebody Else Got Burned First
The idea that backups were “too large to maintain” is, frankly, nonsense.That’s like saying your house is too big to insure — so you’ll just hope it never catches fire.
In IT, redundancy isn’t wasteful — it’s survival. Every byte of critical data should exist in at least one other place, ideally two. That’s why best practices are called best — because they’re the distilled wisdom of every catastrophic failure that came before you.
This event isn’t just a fire. It’s a case study in leadership failure: the predictable outcome when people confuse “cloud” with “invincibility.”
Sidebar: 🔐 Data Protection Best Practices That Actually Work
If you want to make sure you never end up in a headline like this one, start here:
1. Follow the 3-2-1 Rule. Keep 3 copies of your data, on 2 different media types, with 1 stored offsite. Simple, proven, timeless.
2. Implement Immutable Backups. Use write-once storage or versioning systems that can’t be altered or deleted, even by administrators. (Because “oops” is a universal constant.)
3. Air-Gap Critical Data. At least one copy should be physically isolated from the internet. No network access = no ransomware, no fire-linked failure.
4. Test Your Restores Regularly. A backup you’ve never tested isn’t a backup — it’s a placebo. Restore drills should be part of your quarterly routine.
5. Separate Infrastructure Tiers. Don’t put all your eggs — or all your drives — in one data center. Split workloads by location, vendor, or platform to reduce cascading failure.
So, What’s the Takeaway?
Cloud computing is incredible. It’s scalable, collaborative, and it’s revolutionized how we work. But it’s not magic — it’s hardware, software, and people. And when the people in charge of that hardware don’t follow best practices, all the redundancy in the world won’t save you.
So next time you’re evaluating your IT team or leadership, ask a simple question: Where are our backups stored?
If the answer is “in the cloud,” ask again.
Because as South Korea just learned the hard way — sometimes the cloud is just someone else’s burning building.
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