Reason 6. Recover files faster and more reliably from any location
At the end of the day, backup is about having the ability to recover, and online backup services have several advantages here as well. Consider the alternatives:
Online backup provides the simplest alternative. There is no need to purchase or manage hardware or portable media of any kind. Data is streamed seamlessly to an off-site facility and can be restored to any location connected to the Internet. Some services even allow individual files to be located easily and restored independent of other data, often in minutes.
More than 50 percent of small and mid-sized businesses have experienced data loss, according to a 2008 study by Rubicon Consulting. Many different factors can result in lost data. Some of the most common causes are hardware failure, human error, software failure, and viruses. No business is immune to these problems—and that makes backup an essential requirement for today's organizations.
In traditional computing infrastructures – brick and mortar IT if you will – storage is fairly simple to understand. There are two main areas of management – data and disks. In regards to cloud computing, the data management doesn't go away. In fact, I would argue that the data management requirement increases with the clouds. But the all-encompassing disk management requirements go away when clouds storage is used.
There are two fundamental types of clouds storage and explain their usage implications and how they can be applied to organizations as they consider cloud architectures.
"Every morning I step into office, I saw a lot of papers on my table"
"We need to acquire new file cabinet or rent a warehouse to store the printed documents"
"It took us a lot of time and effort to retrieve back past year documents"
"I lost the documents and no idea where I put after I view it. Any one saw it?"
I will admit that cloud technologies are a buzzword. Primarily because there are many different types of clouds and how one organization perceives clouds technology can be fundamentally different than another. In last week's post on cloud storage, I mentioned the how the Amazon Web Services (AWS) storage offerings are provided. For the Simple Storage Service (S3) cloud, availability is described on their website as being 99.99% available. Comparatively the Elastic Block Storage (EBS) cloud is advertised as highly available – yet without a percentage like the S3 cloud. The EBS service offers an automatic replication feature, which is different than the S3 cloud. This automatic replication replicates allocated EBS volumes to the same zone.torage is used.