The cloud has provided an inexpensive opportunity for companies to store their data on servers owned by a cloud storage service provider. Many companies, both small businesses and large corporations, have already made the move to the cloud; many are in the process of moving to the cloud; and many more are considering making the move to the cloud.
By making the move, companies no longer have to worry about the escalating costs of buying and maintaining local servers. If an upgrade is needed, this can mean big expenses in new hardware purchases; whereas in the cloud, upgrades to larger data storage limits can usually be completed within a few minutes directly from a computer browser.
There are still many companies that are hesitant to move all their data to the cloud. Each cloud storage provider has their own policies for transferring and storing data and these policies are not always clear about important concerns that many companies have, such as:
- Who actually owns my data in the cloud?
- What if I want to transfer my data to another cloud storage provider?
As noted on Gigaom, Robert Jenkins, CTO of Cloud Sigma, was quoted as saying,
“It’s not just privacy and security. It’s also — if I change my mind or it doesn’t work out, how do I move on? This is an issue that’s prevalent in public cloud but in the era of big data it’s becoming quite an acute big problem.”
Although most cloud providers have clear policies outlining these concerns, there are those that do not clearly address the issues. The possibility of a cloud “lock-in” is real. You could potentially get your data, and your company’s data, locked into a single cloud provider without an easy way to take your data and move it to another provider. This fear of cloud lock-in has prevented many companies from making the move to the cloud.
When your data is stored in the cloud, you don’t always have complete control over your data as you would in local on-premise storage. However; the solution is a lot easier, and more inexpensive, than you might imagine- data replication and backup.
Data replication provides a continuous copy of your data from one cloud service to another. This gives you control over your data in case something was to happen- server corruption, accidental or malicious deletion, or the fact that your account can get locked for TOS violation, even if no violation occurs. Although the account may be restored later, data loss can occur in this situation. Other forms of data loss can occur and a safe, secure backup with an easy restore feature is needed. And a continuous replication between various cloud providers is much more than just a backup of your data, it’s a complete copy of your data that you can control just in case something happens. There is always the possibility that your cloud provider may change their prices, or perhaps their privacy policy, and you need to be able to effortlessly switch to another provider so that there is no negative effect on your business.
Let’s take Google Apps for example. It should be noted that Google Apps is a GREAT cloud storage provider and I am only using it as an example. If all your data is stored on Google’s servers, your IT team may not feel like they are in control of the data. The simple solution is to use a continuous replication and backup service such as cloudHQ to replicate your data to another cloud service such as Box. This way, no matter what happens to your data on Google, you will have a secure backup of ALL of your data and it will be under your control, thus preventing a cloud lock-in to Google.
The cloud offers a plethora of benefits but there can be costs as well if you’re not careful, don’t read the small print, or don’t have a replication/backup plan in place. The cloud service provider’s databases are not designed to be compatible with each other which is why it can be easy to get locked in and stuck with a single provider. It’s important that you have your plan in place and cloudHQ has the right plan for your company.
CloudHQ provides real-time, continuous replication and synchronization between various cloud services including Google Drive, Skydrive, Dropbox, Box, Evernote, Basecamp, and more. This means you have a safe, secure backup of all data in case data loss on one provider’s service were to occur- and even a small amount of data loss can be disastrous for a company. Plus you get the peace of mind knowing that no matter what happens to your original cloud storage provider, you have a secondary copy that is always under your control. Peace of mind, safety, security- this can make IT admins, CTOs and other corporate managers extremely happy (and perhaps a little less stressed out).
You can take complete control over your data in the cloud. You can prevent cloud lock-in by choosing a cloudHQ plan that best suits your company’s needs.
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