Through my relatively short IT career I've seen the rise of this thing that is referred to as the 'cloud'. It's spoken about as if some monolithic being that provides you the wonderful content your consume on your PCs, or use to conduct business. The reality of the thing as significantly more complex and drastically more piecemeal and important. We've entered a new time where we can centralize our infrastructures in such a way that the user experience is seamless, and our workload is reduced dramatically. With that have come a large and varying number of technologies claiming to be the best at backing up your infrastructure and your clients. Some have started to migrate their data to the 'public cloud' in order to protect themselves from disasters and the like. This is a respectable aim as having data off site is really the best way to go, but they are also handing over their mission essential data to a third party who may or may not be reliable, much less trustworthy. Having your own private cloud doesn't have to be difficult, and it doesn't have to be expensive.
It's important to own your data. I cannot stress this enough. The documents your users store, the records that keep your business going, and the power points your executives display they are all vital to the survivability of your business. You really shouldn't trust data of that kind of importance to some distant data center that isn't truly accountable to you. If you wanted to pull your data, or perhaps virtual infrastructure you've placed there down the road, how cooperative are they going to be? Even worse, what if the public infrastructure goes down? I don't know if you recall but Amazon's cloud service got hit with 11 hours of downtime or limited usage. While the data was in itself safe access to it was cut off.
There are a few solutions out there that can allow you to accomplish a sufficient backup strategy, and without relying on the public cloud. A lot of where to go depends on what sort of infrastructure you have, and what you are looking to back up. Do you have a Hyper-V or ESX(i) set up? Do you have a lot of windows clients, and some windows servers? How big is your infrastructure?
If you are using primarily windows based computers and servers, and/or you are using Hyper-V I might humbly suggest the product I work on for a living. The 3X Backup Appliance is your private cloud right out of the box. You can do file and system level backups for windows machines, and even do VM level backups of Hyper-V. Other than touching the product every day, why do I think it works so well for the private cloud? It's easy to use, requires little maintenance, and features some very effective deduplication.
What ever solution you decide to go with, please do take heed to the plea to 'own your data'. 43% of businesses lose important data due to not having a proper backup strategy. Don't be one of those. At the end of the day your clients will appreciate it, you will be protected, and your data will be safe and accessible. If you have any questions at all about our solution or any others feel free to comment here, email me at ryan.koch@3x.com, use #3XSystems on Twitter, or check out our new Reddit Community.
It's important to own your data. I cannot stress this enough. The documents your users store, the records that keep your business going, and the power points your executives display they are all vital to the survivability of your business. You really shouldn't trust data of that kind of importance to some distant data center that isn't truly accountable to you. If you wanted to pull your data, or perhaps virtual infrastructure you've placed there down the road, how cooperative are they going to be? Even worse, what if the public infrastructure goes down? I don't know if you recall but Amazon's cloud service got hit with 11 hours of downtime or limited usage. While the data was in itself safe access to it was cut off.
There are a few solutions out there that can allow you to accomplish a sufficient backup strategy, and without relying on the public cloud. A lot of where to go depends on what sort of infrastructure you have, and what you are looking to back up. Do you have a Hyper-V or ESX(i) set up? Do you have a lot of windows clients, and some windows servers? How big is your infrastructure?
If you are using primarily windows based computers and servers, and/or you are using Hyper-V I might humbly suggest the product I work on for a living. The 3X Backup Appliance is your private cloud right out of the box. You can do file and system level backups for windows machines, and even do VM level backups of Hyper-V. Other than touching the product every day, why do I think it works so well for the private cloud? It's easy to use, requires little maintenance, and features some very effective deduplication.
What ever solution you decide to go with, please do take heed to the plea to 'own your data'. 43% of businesses lose important data due to not having a proper backup strategy. Don't be one of those. At the end of the day your clients will appreciate it, you will be protected, and your data will be safe and accessible. If you have any questions at all about our solution or any others feel free to comment here, email me at ryan.koch@3x.com, use #3XSystems on Twitter, or check out our new Reddit Community.
Most of the time your IT blogs seem interesting but more than half of the technological terms you use literally go right over my head and I'm confused. BUT, in reading this post I actually understood what you were saying. And, I knew what 'cloud' storage was before I read this. This is exciting for me considering that I am technologically retarded lol. Thank you for sharing.
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