They'd need to immediately shut down their server as well (as in immediately, as in crash), and even that's not necessarily enough to remove data from RAM before attackers can get to it.
The threat scenario is a bit far fetched. First you'd need to find out where an individual, interesting piece of data is stored. Then you have to break into this building, break open the cabinet and freeze the RAM fast enough to preserve the memory content.
That's obviously something that can be done, but it requires a lot of dedication to pull of, so that's something you'd only do in case where you know the data is valuable. It's probably easier to just get an inside job done, but you could get that at any other datacenter or even at AWS.
For a lot of data, the payoff is not worth the effort and risk, so I'd be unconcerned. Obviously, don't store bank accounts or medical data there, don't use it for the next NSA datacenter etc.
Yeah, sure. Nobody would ever notice the truck with the coolant tank in front of the building and the frozen pipes running in ;). Here in Berlin they freeze the ground to make excavations in places with high ground water, that looks the same.
To be honest - law enforcement could pull that off. But that's not the threat model that this is supposed to counter.
The very first people to sign up will all be budding security enthusiasts secretly looking forward to their prime time on Chaos Computer Club or BlackHat or whatever where they take apart one of these servers.
Cool, free pentesting. If I'd plan such an offer I'd give away units for free to CCC members that want to penetrate it. Maybe even throw in some money.
>remove data from RAM before attackers can get to it //
Seems about the last thing you'd try too. Surely you'd try and catch the data on the wire a long time before you'd even contemplate this sort of scenario. At least then you have the chance to get the whole encrypted file you're after.
