Top Ten Reasons to Leave your Cloud Backup Service Provider – Part II

April 29, 2015 Damien Garvey

In Part I, we discussed the five reasons that would make you leave your cloud backup vendor. They included:

1/ The lack of all operating systems support, mobile device support;
2/ Too much focus on appliances;
3/ Agreements not being executed as per SLAs;
4/ Confusing pricing structures; and
5/ Treating archived data and active data same way.

Continuing on this list, the remaining five reasons are:

6/ Bandwidth – Does your vendor throttle your bandwitdth connections? Remember that it takes days and weeks to recover data from an online depositories; and your Internet connection should be fast. Your backup vendor needs to optimise their bandwidth using the latest technologies for better data transfer in your network.

7/ Data Centre Location – At least one copy of your data should always be stored far away from your primary source data. It is recommended that your secondary storage to at least be 2,000 miles away from your primary location. Does this vendor have a geo-dispersed secondary data centre?

8/ Vendor Lock – Is there flexibility for your data? Do you have the ability to backup your data in private, public, or hybrid or a combination of two or more? Is it possible to deploy a third party solution as add on, for instance, salesforce.com, Google Apps, etc?

9/ DRaaS – Disaster Recovery as a Service is not offered by this vendor due to the limitations of the software. In case of a disaster, you need to make sure that your data becomes available quickly and that you are covered for disaster recovery and business continuity. Your vendor always talks about backup and avoids discussing recovery. If DRaaS is not provided, how are you going to recover after a disaster hits? You must be able to instantly access critical data within minutes of a disaster.

10/ Periodic Research of the Vendor – Relationship stays healthy if it is monitored. You need to research about your vendor periodically. If too many complaints are published on the web, or at the local better business bureau (BBB) or at the consumer protection agency, it is a clear indication what is happening at the company. Check to see if the vendor is engaged in the industry. Does the vendor issue frequent meaningful press releases? Does it participate in forums and webinars? Does the vendor post educational blogs and articles on a regular intervals? How about case studies and whitepapers? Any social media activities?

Conclusion
Business relationships are critical for both a vendor and a client to be happy and stay in the relationship. Vendors should be responsible to delivering quality services as agreed to in the SLAs. Service providers should be able to deliver the same quality service to all clients no matter how small or big an organisation is; especially, in the case of a disaster or a virus attack. The vendor should try their best to understand the clients business needs, goals and challenges (including the IT competency levels) and work with you efficiently.

Top Ten Reasons to Leave your Cloud Backup Service Provider – Part I

April 27, 2015 Damien Garvey

Business relationships are important. You have done your homework. You have researched and tested several solutions and settled on one that you thought was a great cloud backup vendor. Before you picked this company, you considered several factors, such as: technology, experience, financial status, reputation, security, compliance, support, certification, scalability, and trust. But, now, the vendor is taking it all for granted and is providing you with substandard services, resulting in not so good relationship.

Is your relationship with your cloud backup vendor healthy? If your business relationship starts to show some signs of stress, chances are the relationship will die at one point. Perhaps, it is time for you to gauge your business relationship. If you notice any or all of the following points, you might be in a bad relationship:

1/ Data Backup – the company doesn’t backup all of your data across all operating systems, and on mobile devices. Are you using various backup solutions across operating systems (iOS, Windows, etc.) and across mobile devices?

2/ Appliance – Is the vendor appliance centric? Do you find yourself spending more than what you planned for appliances? Is the vendor requesting you to acquire additional appliances to match with your backed up data? Relying heavily on appliances might not be an ideal solution. Cloud centric solutions, however, offer unlimited scaling when your data grows. Is your data being tethered to an appliance instead, and as a result, forcing you to delete data and/or buy bigger appliance to gain extra space for your growing data?

3/ SLA – Service Level Agreements are very important. SLAs have a purpose and that is why a great deal of effort is put into preparing them. Does the vendor execute per signed and approved SLA?

4/ Price – the price the vendor is charging you varies all the time, and is complicated, and you can not figure out how the pricing model works. Is it per GB of raw or compressed data? Do you get credit for not recovering data, say, in the past one year?

5/ BLM – Does your vendor treats all data the same and back them all up in the same vault? Keep in mind that all data has the same value. The older a data gets, the less important it becomes. So, mission-critical data should be stored separately with clearly defined RTO and RPO while less important data should be stored in less expensive vaults. Intelligent software have the ability to automatically segment the data into these two tiers.

If you decide to move your services to a new vendor, make sure that you don’t end up with the same problems as the vendor you just switched from. Insist on asking the new vendor to help with the data migration, at least consultation help. Remember that choosing a cloud backup service provider is not a simple task; and the vendor you choose could end up causing you to go out of business.

In Part II, we will discuss other five factors that affect your relationship with your vendor, such as bandwidth throttling; data centre location; vendor lock-in; DRaaS; and periodic vendor research results.

Mitigating and Avoiding Downtime – Part II

April 24, 2015 Rob Mackle

In Part I, we discussed the importance of having a service level agreement to keep cloud services available anytime, from anywhere in order to reduce downtime. If the service provider’s networks are available at all times, users need to worry only for their own infrastructure.

Having said that, however, downtime must always be monitored at all times using advanced network monitoring tools. Record of system outages or downtime should automatically be logged for analysis in real time. Admin should have the ability to enter identified names and email addresses in the system for notifications in case of failures.

Failover servers are programmed to seamlessly take over the service while repairs are carried out to correct the problems in the main server. In addition, help desks and trouble-shooting services offered by online backup services enable the customer to alert his service provider about any and every possible system difficulties that they may encounter in the use of the service. Backing up your data in the cloud has not only the benefit of safeguarding your data, but also minimising or eliminating the detrimental effects of down time for your company.

By putting your data in the cloud, you have the convenience that come with accessibility, scalability and mobility. In addition, you have protected your data from physical destruction, theft, natural disasters, operating systems and hard drive crashes. Cost savings, easy sharing and “set-it-and-forget-it” operations that comes with automated systems are additional benefits. At the same time, extreme care should be exercised in selecting a cloud based backup service provider so as to avoid any fly-by-night operators.

Small, medium and large enterprises use the cloud because not only it is effective and saves money, but also it mitigates downtime. Occasionally, cloud services might get interrupted for various reasons. Even Amazon’s AWS suffered downtime in the past.

To avoid downtime, it is suggested that you get a signed copy of the SLAs, have both on-premise and cloud services, perform a thorough risk analysis, and determine your true downtime cost per hour, which might not be an easy task as it requires complex assumptions and calculations. As cloud services are charged on “pay as you go” basis, calculating actual downtime costs becomes a moving target. However, other costs such as operational, salaries, connectivity, and so on can be figured out easily.

Downtime could possibly be avoided by developing a well thought business continuity and disaster recovery plans. It must be remembered that the cloud does not guarantee that you will have a 100% uptime services, rather, it mitigates the risks of downtime.

Mitigating and Avoiding Downtime – Part I

April 22, 2015 Rob Mackle

In this day and age, backing up your data is crucial to a smooth functioning of your company, be it a small, medium or large sized business. A loss of data can result in a significant loss of revenue for your company. In addition, data loss can cause downtime or an interruption of computing services. The solution to both of these problems is a simple one — back up your data online in the cloud.

Medical informatics, nuclear power stations, banks and other financial institutions, aeronautics/airlines, news and journalism; e-commerce and transaction processing or even online games industries would immediately feel the pressure of downtime or loss of data. A minor downtime and a loss of data in these industries could prove to be disastrous, as existing customers experience frustrations and may consider cancelling their services altogether; and would-be-customers could end up avoiding this particular service, resulting in loss of revenues.

Many contract defaults could be attributed to system downtime or loss of data, resulting in litigation and financial losses. These industries need to ensure high availability, reliability and alternate data access routes to safeguard against business losses, resulting from unplanned downtime, which is the time when computing services are unavailable for business operations.

Cloud backup service providers ensure that your data is safeguarded in the Cloud. Your data is in no danger of being lost. In addition, online backup service providers are a safeguard against downtime and ensure that your company will continue to operate regardless of hardware or software glitches, a natural calamity or just a power outage. System outages can have a serious impact on industries that access their computers 24 x 7 x 365. Others may be sensitive to the time of the outage. Peak hour outages can cripple business and have long-term repercussions on the business.

Online backup service provides offer service level agreements for their customers that spell out the guaranteed service uptime percentage value that they expect over the period of a month, typically five-nines, i.e. — 99.999%. Zero percent downtime indicates that the backup service provider has made arrangements to ensure that the customer has no system outages and the access to the server is made available at all times. Customers will, therefore, have to guard only against outages that may occur at their end of the network, giving them peace of mind.

In Part II, we will discuss further points on avoiding downtime.

Why Do Businesses Move to the Cloud? – Part II

April 20, 2015 Stewart Parkin

In Part I, we discussed the key reason — cost savings — why companies move to Cloud services. However, it appears that saving money is not the sole reason why small and medium sized businesses are switching the Cloud. There are a number of other factors as well that must be taken into account:

• Agility: Allows you to adapt and respond to customers’ needs quickly;
• Efficiency: Workers are provided with the right tools to perform their jobs;
• High Availability: The services are always available supported by redundant data centres;
• Mobility: Allows employees to be mobile and still access data from anywhere and anytime;
• Scalability: Pay-as-you-Go model allows you to scale up or down based on your demand.

Ultimately though, small businesses have to determine for themselves whether it makes sense for them to switch the Cloud or not. It is true that by using the Cloud, there will be less of a need for IT professionals, but that may not necessarily bring the costs down.

If cost alone is the main criteria for businesses deciding to make the switch to the Cloud, then they must decide for themselves if it is economical for them to make the switch. The best way for them to do so is to take a trial run to gain a better understanding of the costs of running applications in the Cloud. This hands on experience will allow them to make a more informed decision.

As Cloud computing brings tremendous advantages, it is likely that you have made up your mind and have moved to the Cloud. However, in case your have not, it is important that decision makers in your organisation are presented with a strong and cohesive plan for their approval. Pointing to the financial savings alone will not be sufficient to make the case; rather you will need to emphasise the whole benefits, such as agility, productivity, scalability, accessibility, profitability, high availability, and more.

We, at Backup Technology, are always available to help you make the right decision by providing you free consultation. Once you are ready to test our Cloud backup and disaster recovery services, we will be happy to set you up with a trial account. Keep in mind that there is more to the Cloud than the eye can see. Entering the Cloud is not an easy proposal, but, do not fret; and we have you covered.

Why Do Businesses Move to the Cloud? – Part I

April 17, 2015 Stewart Parkin

Small and medium businesses are transitioning to the Cloud in ever increasing numbers. In fact, according to Gartner Research, there has been an annual increase of over 18% in the number of subscribers to the Cloud. A variety of factors have led to this increase.

First of all, it appears that it is the soft savings that small and medium businesses receive that is the primary reason for this increase. When using the Cloud, companies do not have to invest in expensive infrastructure or software and this saves them money initially. They can access existing resources that are delivered ready-to-use by Cloud service providers.

For example, ease of use and functionality have a large role to play in the decision making process. All the pains of developing and maintaining the application is left to third parties while customers can enjoy the outcome of the efforts. The Cloud also brings other benefits, such as agility, high availability, efficiency, and mobility all of which you can not put a monetary value to. While you might incur additional expenses at the initial stages, CIOs are beginning to see that there is more to the Cloud than the eye can see in terms of infrastructure savings.

Thus far, many companies have decided to switch to the Cloud because of the savings in cost to them. It should be noted that Cloud related expensive could be claimed as operational costs, rather than capital expenses. Shifting from CAPEX to OPEX not only brings additional benefits to the balance sheet of the organisation, but also removes all of the complex accounting calculations, and gets you the approval of your CFO for making their job much easier.

If your sole reason to switch is to save money, then a thorough financial analysis should be performed. The analysis should clearly show the current and projected costs and savings. Estimating future expenses and savings might be difficult, but if it is done properly, it could get closer to actual figures. It is suggested that companies forecast for only a period of three years as technologies evolve much faster in the IT industry.

Backup Technology recommends that you test the waters by taking our trial before making a decision for yourself. Keep in mind that there is more to the Cloud than dollar savings alone. Count the intangibles and set a value to them, before you decide for or against the Cloud.

In Part II, we will further discuss the additional reasons why businesses move to the Cloud.