The cloud is a term that describes spreading data or services across multiple physical devices, often across different geographical locations. It’s like virtualisation ‘plus’!
These days, a wide range of services can be consumed through a cloud model, including data storage and backup. This is very much a mainstream approach now, and we have many clients using cloud technologies for storage and backup.
What this means to you
- Storing data in the cloud has a number of advantages, including:
access data from anywhere – typically you can access data from anywhere with an internet connection, so it’s very useful if you work from multiple locations, or travel. - resilience – your data is typically ‘replicated’ across several hardware platforms within the provider’s cloud, so the risk of system failure leading to data loss is reduced.
- cost effectiveness – it can be cheaper to use cloud providers, levering their enormous infrastructure, than to set up your own.
- flexibility and scalability – because services like Microsoft’s Azure, Amazon’s AWS and Google Cloud are huge and constantly evolving, it’s often easier to change their service to suit you than it it to change your own platform.
- security – the big cloud service providers invest massive amounts in ensuring that data stored in their services is secure.
It’s a similar case with backup, and our clients often find that cloud backup solutions provide scalability, security and ease that is more difficult to achieve locally at the same price point.
Why we are good
We’ve been working with clients to provide, set up and support cloud storage and cloud backup for years, and we know how to get it right. Despite all the advantages, there are some things to be cautious of, including:
- migration – the actual process of moving the data and/or backup process to the cloud needs to be done right, or there could be some serious problems.
- reliance on the internet – once the data is away from your premises, you need an internet connection to access it.
- compliance – data protection legislation applies to data stored in the cloud as well it does to data stored on your premises, so you need to make sure it’s compliant.
We can help with these, and other elements of cloud services.
What we can do
We can provide high quality, industry standard cloud storage and cloud backup services that help you to manage and protect important data in an affordable way.
We use leading partners to ensure that data in cloud storage is safe, secure and easily accessible to you, when you want it, and that cloud backups pick up the important data and system settings that we’d need in order to restore individual files or even a whole system.