The advantages of cloud data storage and cloud applications are increasingly appreciated, even by smaller companies; in fact, smaller companies often reap the greatest advantages because it enables them to pay for software only when they use it and storage space only when they need it.
What's more, it relieves businesses of some substantial risks and overheads. Keeping up with the burdens imposed by constantly evolving cyber-threats and constantly updating operating systems and software requires trained IT staff dedicated to housekeeping tasks. This either means paying for new manpower or diverting your existing talent.
Sadly, management often fails to appreciate the risks of overstretching its own IT resources. The wake-up call can be; a damaging cyber-exploit, a network crash, a data protection prosecution, document control chaos, or serious data loss. Losing your entire accounts and customer database because of hard disk failure or data corruption is probably the most fatal.
According to the Breach Level Index, forty-three percent of data loss is due to hardware failure, human error makes up 30%, software corruption is 12%, malware and theft is 12% and the remaining 3% is from unspecified causes.
We don’t need to tell you to backup
If the last time you did a backup was onto a floppy disk, you have a problem. Not only is it a miracle that you are still in business, but also it means that you won’t appreciate how hard it has become to create adequate backups that can be restored when the need arises.
This is not merely because the information you depend on has increased in quantity but also because all your office staff, field staff and business partners are constantly busy producing, sharing and amending it.
Cloud to cloud backup
Maintaining in-house data integrity is challenging, backing up can be taxing, but disaster recovery can be a nightmare. Keeping your key data resources in the cloud solves a lot of document control problems, but these problems increase exponentially if you can’t restore swiftly. Employees turn to local copies and post-it notes to keep things rolling and everyone working with the same client or on the same project soon has their own version.
Private cloud providers are specialists; they make cloud to cloud backups and cloud to cloud restores fast and simple. Data is secured by features you may not have access to in-house, such as 256-bit encryption. You will be able to specify your precise retention policies, easily comply with DPA and GDPR requirements, and integrate the service with your choice of resource sharing platforms, such as Dropbox, OneDrive, Amazon’s S3, Azure, Rackspace and OpenStack.
However you and your business work, storing and protecting information in the cloud is almost certainly cheaper than the cost of buying your own hardware and operating it safely.
