FINAL WORD
“
THE CONSUMERISATION
OF IT, WHICH IS SO MUCH A PART
OF THE PUBLIC CLOUD PLATFORM,
CONTINUES TO BE AN ENABLER FOR
THE DOUBLE-DIGIT GROWTH OF IT
SPENDING.
opened the gates for a large number of users
to come on board and use the platform.
While the number of cloud-enabled users will
definitely boost collaboration and workflow
inside an organisation, it exposes a wider
segment of executives to the vagaries of an
external environment.
Irrespective of the service level agreements
of uptime provided by the cloud service
providers, business organisations must
have the complete copy of their cloud data
accessible to themselves in the event of a
wide-spread operational failure or unexpected
litigation or force majeure of any sort. Recent
global outages involving large cloud service
providers, like the recent Google outage, have
led consultants to point out that losses from
such prolonged incidents could run into tens
of billions of dollars.
Migration of an organisation’s employees
to cloud platforms has meant they now
have access to data stored on the cloud.
Irrespective of how well security policies
have been mapped into cloud application
platforms, accidental deletion or malicious
deletion of data by users is another
unpredictable possibility for the loss of data
in the cloud.
Consulting company, Aberdeen Group,
points out that the most common reason
for data loss in the public cloud, is end-user
deletion, even when multiple confirmation
steps are required. While such incidents are
definitely not frequent, when they do occur,
the financial losses could be devastating. In
other words, the cloud platform does not offer
a fool-proof plan for data protection unless
organisations actively build such a plan.
One of the best ways to build such a fool-
proof plan is to invest in a data backup
solution that can replicate and save data
from the cloud to on-premises, irrespective
of which cloud platform is being used by
the organisation. Moreover, the best backup
solution is one which allows data to be
backed up from multiple cloud platforms
Simon Hwang, APAC President from Synology
and saved on-premises. The reason for this
is, most organisations are in a multi-cloud
platform environment rather than a single
cloud one.
Such a backup solution would work
equally well whether the cloud platform
was Microsoft’s Office 365, OneDrive
or MyDrive, as common examples. The
backup solution would also offer multiple
modes of backup operation, which could
be a continuous mode process, scheduled
process or manual process.
With increasing prices of cloud storage
services, as you include value added services
such as security, backup and recovery,
backing up data from the cloud to on-
premises, is getting increasingly economical.
This is more pronounced for large, sprawling,
global enterprises.
By backing up data from the cloud to
on-premises, end users can save on cloud
storage costs and only keep the most current
data in their licensed cloud platforms.
Lastly, the backup solution should offer the
latest storage management features such
as deduplication and single instance data
management. This would bring cost and
storage efficiency to the organisation that
has taken the initiative to backup cloud data
into an on-premises data management
platform. While innovative technologies may
come and go, offering multiple opportunities
for businesses to adapt and move efficiently
forward, being able to successfully manage
inherent risks is also part of the success. n
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