After a fire destroyed one of its data centres in Strasbourg, France last week, hosting provider OVHcloud’s founder says it’s time to shake up how backup services are delivered.
OVHcloud founder Octave Klaba posted a video to Twitter last week where he confirmed that OVHcloud will start providing backups for customers in all its data centers by “by default, without payment.”
Update 16 mars 8:30pm
Here, the 10min’s video with last updates about the fire in our DC in SBG2. pic.twitter.com/BPaa9pEBZk— Octave Klaba (@olesovhcom) March 16, 2021
“This is our strategy…our answer to this incident that we never want to re-live in the future,” Klaba said.
The fire and subsequent shift in how the hosting provider plans to deliver backup services will “change the standard of the industry.”
He says it will also address any confusion customers have about the services they paid money for, including backup. It can easily become an afterthought determining if a cloud service comes with backup by default.
“It seems that globally, customers understand what we are delivering, but some customers, they don’t understand what exactly they bought,” he said.
Klaba noted that investigators had extracted UPS units, batteries and fuses for analysis, as well as surveillance-camera footage.
The fire is still under investigation, and the hosting provider’s website says investigators are focused on UPS systems in SBG2, the data centre on the four-facility Strasbourg campus where the fire started.
The latest information about service statuses along with other updates can be found here.