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Bringing Clarity to the Cloud: Five Tips to Ensure Business Continuity and Securely Store Data
Cloud computing has been touted as the 'next big thing' in the tech sector. By delivering IT functionality at a lower cost with greater agility, cloud computing has enabled small businesses to save substantially on data storage. According to Global Industry Analysts, cloud computing is projected to be a more than $200 billion market opportunity by 2015. However, recent high-profile cloud outages have heightened security concerns in the minds of small business owners about the safety of cloud computing over traditional on-premise servers. Generally, cloud servers are a safer option. The most reliable cloud computing providers have redundant systems in place to backup data to alternate locations and enable you to recover it quickly. Nevertheless, how can you - as a small business owner - ensure business continuity in the cloud? Tip 1: Safely and Affordably Store Your Data on Cloud Servers As I've seen 'from the trenches' working with thousands of small businesses, cloud computing services offer small businesses greater IT reliability and security than on-premise solutions. In fact, according to a recent IDC report, businesses operating in the cloud achieve 97 percent greater IT reliability. Cloud servers can securely host your mission-critical business information, including websites, accounting software, customer databases, sales force automation and point of sale - while giving you the peace of mind. Not only is data more secure in a fully-managed data center, it also provides strong ROI. Typically, a cloud solution lowers the total cost of ownership by more than 50 percent and provides predictable monthly expenses while reducing initial investment, hardware replacement costs and maintenance expenses.
Most small businesses do not have a holistic network security plan. The cloud can support a no-single-point-of-failure strategy by providing both increased network and physical security. Cloud services provide an enterprise firewall to protect against multiple threats, including at the application layer, and private firewalls that can be customized to the level of protection needed. Other benefits include proactive installation of the latest anti-virus software, in-line intrusion protection systems and security patches. The most sophisticated data centers have staff on-site 24x7x365, biometric identity verification, zoned access, round-the-clock monitoring and redundancies in cooling, power and fire suppression. Tip 3: Properly Destroy Data for Greater Security
In addition to lacking a comprehensive network security plan, most small
businesses do not have the resources to properly destroy data. A cloud
service provider can and should offer Department of Defense-level
removal of data on drives as well as permanent destruction of the
physical drives. Tip 4: Set Automatic Backups to Run on a Regular Basis Small businesses often don't have the luxury of off-site backup and recovery. The cloud can alleviate this burden. Look for vendors who offer unmetered backup, full system recovery of the server and daily offsite replication of recovery points. Small business owners should schedule backups while their computers are not running or plan for regular backups daily, weekly or monthly. After moving to the cloud, one of our customers automatically backed up all files nightly using our server and, as a result, spent $36,000 less per year on server backup and maintenance.
In addition to moving data to standby cloud servers, develop a recovery plan to cover the unexpected. This plan should be saved to multiple server locations. With all technology, including cloud computing, outages can occur. However, the benefits of cloud computing far outweigh the risks. As a small business owner, you can learn from the recent publicized cloud outages. These five tips can lay the foundation for secure data storage and business continuity. As Ramon Ray recently wrote in Smallbiztechnology.com, "Have backup systems in place with your vendor. If you have an important application running in the cloud, you MUST make the investment to have an engineer build systems that have failovers and redundancy." Brooks Robinson is president of Cbeyond’s Cloud Services Division. You can contact Brooks at brooks.robinson@cbeyond.net. |
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