Overview:
Over the past several years, moving to the Cloud has become more and more prevalent. The Cloud can mean many things. To begin at the very basics, the term "Cloud" essentially means over the Internet on someone else's system rather than your own. The more commonly used context for the phrase "in the Cloud" is that the subject solution is hosted by a large company. As with anything though, there always trade-offs.
Email:
One of the first technologies to move to the Cloud other than the hosting of websites is email. Back in the day, it was quite common for organization to have their own email server such as Microsoft Exchange. Today, owning, powering, cooling, and maintaining an on-premises email server is rare. In the business space, two of today's most popular Cloud-based email services are Office 365 and Google Workspace. For consumers, as we know there are many offerings for Cloud-based email such as Gmail and Outlook.com, and to refer to older technology, there's Yahoo, Earthlink, and more.
Storage:
In business, although on-premises servers (physical and virtual) are still quite commonplace along with, for smaller offices, network-attached storage devices such as QNAP and Synology, Cloud-based storage is now ubiquitous; e.g., Microsoft OneDrive, Microsoft SharePoint, Google Drive, Box, Egnyte, and Dropbox. In fact, Microsoft has now bundled OneDrive with its Office productivity suite.
The Concerns:
Once moved to the Cloud, many businesses and individuals simply "set it and forget it" but the Cloud is not a panacea. Naturally, Internet access is required in order to access Cloud-based data and services.
What if there's an Internet outage at your location? Will tethering to a smartphone's Hotspot be sufficient? Do you and your staff go home and work on laptops or home-based desktops? Solution: Plexus8 regularly sources cost-effective secondary Internet Service Providers (ISPs). With an appropriate firewall in place, we configure automatic failover between primary and secondary ISPs. This means that if the primary (faster) ISP has an outage, the secondary takes automatically takes over and, conversely, when the primary service is restored, the connection reverts to the primary.
What if the Cloud-based service itself has an outage, what happens then?
Solution: Plexus8 implements secure cloud-to-cloud backup services. With this in place, it means that, for example, in the event a Cloud-based service such as Office 365 is down, all email data can be easily retrieved from an independent 3rd party resource.
What if the Cloud-based service suffers a security breach and your data is at-risk?
Solution: Plexus8's philosophy on data is that it should "live" in at least three (3) places:
In production - whether in the Cloud or on-premises;
Local backup; and
Independent, secure, Cloud-based backup.
Conclusion:
It's imperative that as organizations continue to adapt new technologies, which inevitably include Cloud-based solutions, appropriate strategies are implemented to ensure business continuity. As such, our clients rest assured they'll always have access to their data.
Our initial consultation is always free of charge.
Feel free to email us at info@plexus8.com or schedule a Zoom meeting.
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