A public television station in the United States is in court trying to get its own archive back, and the reason should make every business owner pause: the company it paid to store the data went out of business.
Nine PBS in St. Louis has sued Iron Mountain Data Centers in Denver, seeking the return of roughly 50 terabytes of material covering seven decades of programming. The station did not deal with Iron Mountain directly. It had a contract with a cloud storage provider, Open Source Storage, which rented space in the Iron Mountain facility. When that provider went defunct, the station says its access was cut off on the day the contract expired.
Iron Mountain’s position is that it never had access to the data at all. It rents physical space, and handing over another company’s hardware would have breached its own contracts and risked exposing other clients’ information. A Denver judge has since ruled that Nine PBS owns the material and ordered the parties to cooperate on retrieval within 30 days.
Why this matters to a small business
Nobody hacked anything here. There was no ransomware and no data breach. The archive became unreachable because of a supplier failure and a contract, which is a far more common way to lose access to your own information than an attack is.
Three questions worth asking about every system your business relies on:
- Who actually holds your data? The company you pay may be reselling someone else’s data centre, as happened here.
- Could you get it back tomorrow if the supplier vanished? If the only copy lives in their platform, the answer is usually no.
- Do you hold an independent copy? A backup you control, separate from the vendor, is what turns a supplier collapse into an inconvenience rather than a disaster.
Cloud services are not the problem. Assuming that “it is in the cloud” means “it is backed up and it is ours” is the problem. Your accounting file, your customer records, your email and your job history are all worth the same five minutes of checking.
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