When Your Vendor Disappears, What Happens to Your Data?
- Brittany Perry
- 5 days ago
- 3 min read
50TB. More than 11,000 files. Roughly 70 years of history. And suddenly, no access.
That's the situation facing Nine PBS, a public television station in St. Louis, after its cloud-storage provider, Open Source Storage (OSS), reportedly ceased operating.
Nine PBS hadn't simply stored a collection of ordinary business files with the provider. Its archive contains decades of historically significant programming and footage documenting events ranging from the Great Flood of 1993 to the COVID-19 pandemic and the history of East St. Louis.
The data wasn't necessarily gone. The bigger problem was that Nine PBS could no longer access it.
And that distinction offers an important lesson for any organization relying on outside vendors to support critical data and infrastructure.
Do You Know What's Behind Your Provider?
Nine PBS contracted with OSS for its storage services. But the physical infrastructure containing the station's data was housed at an Iron Mountain data center in Denver.
When OSS stopped responding, Nine PBS suddenly found itself dealing with an organization with which it did not have the same direct contractual relationship.
The result was a complicated combination of technology, vendor relationships, contracts, infrastructure ownership, and data-access rights.
For IT leaders, it raises an important question: How well do you understand the infrastructure — and the vendors — behind your critical data and systems?
Don't Just Plan for Downtime. Plan for Vendor Failure.
Business continuity planning often focuses on hardware failures, power outages, natural disasters, cybersecurity incidents, and other technical disruptions.
But vendors can fail, too.
A provider can be acquired, discontinue a service, encounter financial problems, stop supporting a platform, or simply go out of business.
Organizations should understand not only how their infrastructure operates today, but what happens if a critical provider is suddenly no longer available.
Questions worth asking include:
Where does our data physically reside?
Who owns and controls the underlying infrastructure?
Are subcontractors or additional providers involved?
Do we have independent copies of critical data?
How quickly could we migrate to another environment?
What happens to our data and equipment if the vendor relationship ends?
Who has the authority and technical ability to retrieve it?
The best time to answer those questions is before you need the answers.
Your Exit Strategy Matters as Much as Your Entry Strategy
Organizations spend considerable time evaluating a provider before signing a contract.
They should put similar thought into how they would eventually leave.
Whether you're selecting a colocation facility, moving infrastructure, migrating workloads, or engaging another technology provider, an exit strategy should be part of the original plan.
That means understanding data portability, equipment ownership, access rights, contract termination provisions, backup strategies, migration requirements, and the resources necessary to move to another environment.
If a provider suddenly becomes unavailable, you don't want to start building your contingency plan from scratch.
Look Beyond Price When Evaluating Data Center Partners
Cost matters. But selecting a data center or colocation provider should involve much more than comparing monthly rates.
Power and cooling capacity, redundancy, connectivity, carrier availability, physical security, SLAs, scalability, disaster preparedness, support capabilities, and financial and operational stability can all affect long-term risk.
A comprehensive data center assessment can help organizations evaluate those factors before committing critical infrastructure to a facility or provider.
The objective isn't simply to find somewhere to put your equipment.
It's to build an infrastructure strategy that can continue supporting the business when circumstances change.
Know How You Would Move — Before You Have To
Sometimes moving infrastructure is planned years in advance. Other times, circumstances accelerate the timeline.
Having an experienced infrastructure partner already familiar with your environment can make it easier to evaluate alternatives, develop a migration strategy, coordinate equipment and vendors, and execute a data center move or consolidation when necessary.
That planning can include everything from inventory and site assessments to deinstallation, transportation, reinstallation, testing, and ongoing hardware support.
A Reminder Worth 50TB
The Nine PBS situation is still developing. A Denver judge has now established a framework allowing the station to retrieve its archive with the assistance of a qualified third party, subject to specific conditions.
That's encouraging news.
But the larger lesson applies to virtually every organization: Having your data stored somewhere isn't the same as having a resilient strategy for accessing and protecting it.
Know where your infrastructure lives. Understand who controls it. Evaluate the vendors behind it. Maintain independent protections for critical data. And have a plan for what happens if you suddenly need to move.
Because your disaster recovery plan shouldn't begin when your vendor stops answering the phone.
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