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The only thing between your data and /dev/null in a cloud data center is a vacation and expired credit card.

Thank goodness storage is cheap. I've had a revolving door of credit/debit card numbers over the last few years thanks to identity theft, and the SaaS providers I use for personal stuff are really good about keeping my data around even after invalid credit-card auto-pay cycles fail.

For more serious data, I have to imagine that SLAs generally define data retention periods even after exiting the agreement, right? (I legitimately don't know)

This is also a bit "above my pay grade", but i've heard bits and pieces about how our company has some kind of agreement setup that if there is a billing dispute that there is a minimum amount of time that must pass before they can shut us down.

Obviously it doesn't help if the company goes under, but it's not as simple as the parent commenters statement.

It depends on the vendor. I negotiated a pretty big agreement a few years ago and were able to get the vendor to agree to hold data for a year after termination. We also backup to another provider.

That said, over the years I've witnessed all manner of billing and payment fuckups. I'm not trying to say that cloud is bad -- but that billing snafu is a risk factor that you need to understand and account for.

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