Cisco's Meraki cloud configuration error causes customer data loss
07 Aug 2017
Cisco has admitted it lost some customers' data last week due to a Meraki cloud configuration error.
The company revealed in an update on Friday that its engineering team made a configuration change on the North American object storage service which caused some of its customer data to be deleted.
Meraki which is a subsidiary of Cisco, offers cloud-managed information technologies for wireless, switching, security, EMM, communications and security cameras via its web-based dashboard interface.
"On August 3rd, 2017, our 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," the company said. "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."
According to the firm, its engineering team has been working over the week to see whether any customers' data could be recovered and will provide a tool to "help our customers specifically identify what has been lost from their organisation".
According to commentators, some users may already know the impact on their own organisations as Cisco has already identified ''Enterprise Apps'' as one of the areas that was impacted, which was not like likely to go unnoticed. Also missing are interactive voice response menus which could also be noticed pretty quickly by customers.
They say incident comes as an embarrassment for Cisco, which markets its Meraki cloud service as a solution for automating networks and voice systems. They add the glaring error and the fact that it did not have systems in place to recover the lost data will not cast the company in a positive light.
