On the 10th of March this year, what many would have thought unthinkable happened. The huge OVH data centre in Strasbourg went up in flames. Despite the efforts of 100 fire fighters and 43 fire engines struggling to save it, huge parts of the building were totally destroyed taking with it vast swathes of the cloud storage data it held.

It was a colossal devastation and according to the VentureBeat report, it took down around three and a half million websites. OVH is the largest hosting provider in Europe and the third largest in the world.

Theoretically while this would have been a serious inconvenience to all the clients with data stored there, there was worse news to come. It very soon became apparent that immense amounts of data had not been backed up and were gone forever. For example, the game development studio behind Rust revealed that the data it had lost was unable to be recovered. "We’ve confirmed a total loss of the affected EU servers during the OVH data centre fire...Data will be unable to be restored."

While many other users are now waiting with bated breath and gritted teeth to find out if all their data has gone the same way, OVHcloud founder Octave Klaba has promised that from now on free backups will be included in all future services, because users are relying on cloud services without understanding what they are getting nor the level of reliability. "It seems that ... some customers, they don’t understand what exactly they bought" said Klaba.

This experience should be a massive wake-up call to businesses everywhere who shove all their critical business data and documents onto the cloud with the assumption that it will all be taken care of by somebody else with the realisation that a disaster that was no fault of their own could happen miles away in another country and the next morning you wake up to find all your data gone with no chance of recovery.

Every business owner reading this that uses a cloud service, ask yourself: how confident are you right now that this couldn’t happen to you?

Supplier CRM will store your data in a UK data storage facility with on-site fire detection and security. And importantly, regular backups of your data will be taken and stored offsite and you will have a disaster recovery plan put in place for you.

On a final note, anyone who is feeling relieved right now that they don't use cloud services, you might actually be in a worse position. What would happen to your information if your head office caught fire one night?