[pphysch]

On a related note, suppose the Fed raises rates to mitigate inflation and indirectly kills thousands of zombie companies, including many SaaS renting the cloud. What happens to their data? Does the cloud unilaterally evict/delete it, or does it get handled like an asset -- auctioned off, etc?

[cmckn]

I’m not aware of a cloud provider that is contractually allowed to do such a thing (except maybe alibaba by way of the CCP). Dying companies get purchased and have their assets pilfered every day, the same thing would happen with cloud assets.

[bpicolo]

If the dead company stops paying the bills, Amazon can definitely delete that.

[cmckn]

Of course, I meant the idea of auctioning it off or otherwise accessing the customer’s data.

When I worked in Azure, I accidentally created some internal resources in a personal account. I didn’t have the ability to delete them after I left; the only way to do so was to cancel the credit card and let the grace period expire.

[Uehreka]

> does it get handled like an asset -- auctioned off, etc?

Who would buy that? I guess if this happened enough then people would start "data salvager" companies that specialize in going through data they have no schema for looking for a way to sell something of it to someone else. I have to imagine the margins in a business like that would be abysmal, and all the while you'd be in a pretty dark place ethically going through data that users never wanted you to have in the first place.

Of course, all these questions are moot because if this happened the GDPR would nuke the cloud provider from orbit.