One of the questions we always ask of cloud hosted companies what their plan is in case they ever lose their cloud account. Typically this is met with incredulity: nobody has ever lost their AWS account and all it's data? Right? Right???

Well, not normally, no. But it does happen. Not often enough to be a meaningful statistical issue, but if it were to happen to you then a little forethought can turn a complete disaster into a survivable event. If you store all your data 'in the cloud' realize that your account could be compromised, used to store illegal data, be subject to social engineering and lots of other ways that could result in a cloud services provider to protect their brand rather than your data. If - like the author - you are lucky you'll only be down for a couple of days. But for most businesses that's the end of the line, especially if you run a multi-tenant SaaS or something like that. So plan for the worst and hope for the best.