Cloud services are ubiquitous now, with most of us trusting at least some of our data to the likes of Apple, Google, or Microsoft. Whether it's a lifetime of photos, or your contacts or email, chances are you're making use of a cloud provider. But should you trust cloud providers with your most sensitive data?

There are some serious drawbacks to offloading data to a corporation that once might've been stored on a hard drive in your house. Here are some of the reasons you shouldn't trust your cloud provider, as well as some things you can do to improve the security, safety, and privacy of your data.

5 Don't expect your provider to stick around forever

Smaller providers can offer benefits, but they might not stick around

One serious consideration when using a cloud provider, whether it's a smaller platform for private email-calendar sync, or the likes of Google and Apple, is to just keep in mind that nothing lasts forever. Providers do remove products, increase fees, change functionality, or outright disappear.

This doesn't mean that it's a bad idea to use a cloud provider. But, you should consider your level of investment in a provider, and how easy it will be to migrate if something changes. This form of vendor lock in, especially with proprietary services, can make it extremely difficult to move providers, potentially leaving you missing out on features you desire elsewhere, or paying more than you should just to avoid migrating.

4 Consider your privacy when choosing a provider

Different providers will use your data in different ways

Another serious consideration when choosing a cloud provider, and also while deciding how much data to share with a provider, is how your data will be used. Different providers will use your data in different ways, for all kinds of things, such as training ML models or LLMs. Your comfort with this will depend on personal preferences, but it is important to note that there are alternatives to the 'big' providers, where utilization of your data for commercial purposes is presumed.

Alternative providers can offer a different approach, such as avoiding advertising and data mining in favor of small subscription fees. These companies may offer better privacy, but might also be at a higher risk of closure, or changing their model on a whim, than the big providers like Apple or Google would.

We'd also recommend being careful of any providers who are obviously 'too good to be true.' The last thing you want to do is invest your time (and data) in a platform that will ultimately rug-pull its customers or close down entirely.

3 Cloud provider uptime isn't guaranteed

Console users might have opinions on this one

One downside of storing your data in the cloud that you might not even be aware of until it affects you at a critical moment is that cloud providers aren't always up. You might've experienced frustration with this if you're a console user, but while cloud provider networks are designed from the ground up with resiliency in mind, outages still happen.

This is something we'd recommend considering when choosing providers for cloud services. Some have far superior records than others in this area. Regardless, it's a good idea to keep critical emails, documents, and data available offline as well, especially if it might be needed in a time-sensitive manner.

Generally, most big providers have good records on uptime, but this isn't guaranteed, and extended downtime certainly isn't unprecedented. Even Meta has experienced several downtime incidents recently, including outages for Instagram and Messenger.

2 A cloud security breach can be devastating

The more data you're storing in the cloud, the greater your exposure to a security breach

Keeping your accounts online secure is obviously essential, but as your usage of the cloud grows, so does the potential damage caused by a breach. Storing your data in the cloud is not a backup, and you run a serious risk of losing all of your data if your cloud security is breached without offline copies of your data.

There are a range of ways to ensure your security online is as strong as possible. This might include using a strong password and password manager, using a hardware key to secure your accounts like a YubiKey, and ensuring that you have two-factor authentication enabled on all of your accounts.

1 Cloud providers do make mistakes

Unlikely, but it does happen

Now we should preface this one by saying that it is, in general, extremely unlikely that you would suffer a loss of data directly through your cloud provider. Most established providers keep multiple redundant copies of your data, distributing it across a range of data centers and locations.

Having said that — it does happen. An Australian pension fund discovered this recently, after a human error in configuration at GCP (Google Cloud Platform) accidentally marked an entire organization's account for deletion. In this case, luckily, the organization had backups stored with another cloud provider, but they still experienced several weeks of downtime while restoring their infrastructure.

We should stress, this is very unlikely to happen. Less likely than a random failure on a hard drive at home, or another similar technical problem that might fry your data even if it was stored offline. This does, however, stress the point that the cloud is not a backup. It is essential to keep backups of your most important data, preferably offline and in a secondary location. This could be as simple as keeping a hard drive with a friend or family member, and updating it every few months or so.

Don't stop using your cloud provider

It's important to be clear about one thing. Don't stop using your cloud provider. The rise of the cloud has been, broadly, fantastic for consumers over the last decade, giving everyone access to cheap and easy cloud storage, safe and secure online email providers, file and photo syncing, among much more.

But, it is important to consider some of the risks of putting your data in the cloud, and be cognizant of what data you're storing where. If you are going to store your most essential data in the cloud, ensure you've got offline hard copies, and sync your data to secondary locations. Alternatively, there are plenty of ways to self-host many of these cloud services using a NAS or old PC.