Cisco acknowledges cloud IT snafu; customers hit

Cisco needs to change its marketing promo for its Cisco Meraki cloud operation.

“We create 100% cloud managed IT that simply works,” Meraki boasts.

No longer.

Proving again that the cloud is NOT perfectly safe for all your data and apps, the latest incident involves Cisco which is acknowledging an internal “erroneous policy” update at its Cisco Meraki company wiped out some customer data.

“[O]ur engineering team made a configuration change that applied an erroneous policy to our North American object storage service and caused certain data uploaded prior to 11:20AM Pacific time on August 3 to be deleted,” Cisco said in a customer update.

“The issue has since been remediated and is no longer occurring. In the majority of cases, this issue will not impact network operations, but will be an inconvenience as some of your data may have been lost. Your network configuration data is not lost or impacted – this issue is limited to user-uploaded data.”

Tech news site CloudData points out that Meraki offers “cloud-controlled Wi-Fi, routing and security, included custom logos, floor plans, audio such as hold music and voicemail greetings, as well as custom enterprise applications.”

U.K. tech news site The Register didn’t mince words about the impact of the outage, which labels the snafu a “cockup.”

VIDEO: Watch a video overview about Meraki at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zbq6d5v7xRc

{[T]he incident is a huge mess for Cisco, because Meraki’s sold on the basis that its supporting cloud service removes much of the grunt work required to run networks and voice systems,” The Register reported Monday.

“That Meraki’s team made such a substantial mistake – and seemingly lacked data protection tools to cover such an eventuality – is a very big black mark on its reputation. not least because it leaves Cisco open to comparisons to far-smaller outfit GitLab, GitLab, which had five dysfunctional backup tools.”

Even Amazon Web Services and Google’s cloud have suffered cloud woes in the past.

What’s the implication of the outage?

“This new incident will, however, re-enforce those who advocate cloud-to-cloud backup, failover options that kick in when clouds croak, or staying on-premises and/or in managed services situations where you can see exactly what’s going on instead of trusting to cloud operators’ promises of colossal scale and attention to detail,” The Register warns.

Cisco Meraki is based in San Francisco. Its solutions include wireless, switching, security, EMM, communications, and security cameras, all centrally managed from the web, according to Wikipedia.

At its website, Meraki boasts:

“Technology can connect us, empower us, and drive us. At Cisco Meraki, we believe that by simplifying powerful technology, we can free passionate people to focus on their mission and reach groups previously left in the darkness.

“Founded in 2006, Meraki has grown to become an industry leader in the IT space, with over 140,000 customers and 2 million network devices and counting online around the world. Our comprehensive set of solutions includes wireless, switching, security, communications, EMM, and security cameras, all managed through Meraki’s web-based dashboard interface. This allows customers to seize new business opportunities and reduce operational costs.”

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