Chicago, IL -- While cloud computing offers several benefits to your organization, it can also present a few costly nightmares, thanks to unforeseen service outages or natural disasters. And to ensure that your business isn’t caught unprepared, implementing cloud backup strategies is a smart move, says Brian McCarthy CTO/Co-founder of Cloud Caboodle, a national consultant on Cloud Storage for backup and recovery.
Here is a list we provide our customers:
1. Address specific business needs by defining a solution for cloud data backup. Don’t forget to also address user needs.
2. Conduct a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) analysis. “Use a provider that can integrate archives, so you can move data sets from a backup plan to an archive plan and provides online search and retrieval functionality, like a StorSimple or Nasuni.”
3. Test and re-test. Put the cloud data backup strategy in place before you really need it.
4. To ensure security, encrypt backup data, using only 128 or 256-bit AES.
5. Follow governance and compliance rules. “For example, regulatory compliance related to where data may move or be stored when different countries or regions are involved, or compliance related to retention periods of data.”
6. Staff should be familiar with procedures related to bulk data import “wherein data is shipped on removable media storage to on-premise.” According to McCarthy, this option will be critical when faster data recovery is needed for large data backups.
7. Backup locally and remotely — to both on-premise and cloud storage.
8. If the purpose of putting data in the cloud is for public accessibility, then backup the data locally before storing in cloud.
9. Use multi-cloud providers. Rackspace, Nirvanix or Microsoft. “I'd recommend backing-up very important and critical data to multiple vendors to mitigate risks.” Two different cloud site will give you 99.99% up-time, three clouds 99.999%, and so on.
10. Ensure that backed-up data can be recovered on-premise or to another cloud vendor. We recommend i365 and their "Plug-n-Protect product."
“The cloud can help a company consolidate an IT infrastructure, reduce the need for IT capital investments, and, as mobile technologies proliferate across enterprises, improve ‘anywhere’ access to information, says McCarthy”
Users must answer several questions that relate to contractual issues before utilizing the cloud, such as the nature of service-level agreements, which services or operations can be moved to the cloud, and whether services should move to a public, private or “hybrid” cloud.
Cloud Caboodle, which specializes in virtualization, cloud storage, Backup, archive, computing and related issues for data protection. We have authored of hundreds of article on the subject of Data Protection. Follow us on Twitter @cloudcaboodle. For more information contact us at (877) 904-4347 or email info@cloudcaboodle.com
Tags: EMC, Equallogic, EVA, NetApp, HDS, HP, Dell, Data Domain, Quantum, iSCSI SAN, FC SAN, NAS, Dedupe, Netbackup, Backup Exec, VMware, Cloup Storage, i365, Mozy, SNIA, i365, Nasuni, StorSimple, TwinStrater, Sonian, Gartner Magic Quadrant, Nirvanix, Amazon S3, EC2, Rackspace, Microsoft Windows Azure 365, Enterprise Cloud Storage, Cloud Gateway, TwinStrata, Egnyte, Mimosa, Iron Mountain, Evault, SaaS, price, cost, dedupe, disk to disk, Symantec, EnterpriseVault, NetBackup appliance, Backup Exec, Veritas, SSD, vRanger, Veeam, VMware, Hybrid, iCloud, SharePoint, Storage-as-a-Service, Commvault, Big Data, SLA, iCloud, Riverbed Whitewater, Steelhead, storage appliance, WAN, Iron Mountain, Mimosa Nearstore
New research reveals that 66% of enterprises plan to move to a hybrid cloud environment within the next four years.
Austin, TX -- The study of 150 enterprise CIOs and IT Directors finds that a large majority plan to combine public cloud and private data centres to deliver business applications – rather than opting for a cloud only (17%) or private data centre only approach (17%). Results also highlight trends in cloud networking, delivery, adoption and barriers to adoption.
Networking in the cloud
To support the hybrid cloud model over 63% of businesses surveyed plan to use a mixture of traditional MPLS-based corporate networks and cost-effective IP-VPNs. With almost 70% of companies citing cost reduction as the primary driver for selecting a cloud project, moving to a hybrid networking strategy emerges as a popular route to control IT budgets.
Cloud delivery
Despite the increased complexity associated with adopting a hybrid networking model, surprisingly over 50% of companies plan to deploy and manage their on-going cloud program themselves, using their own IT department. Just 31% plan to outsource this process to external service providers to manage with the remainder not planning to adopt the cloud.
Cloud adoption and barriers to adoption
By the end of 2012 50% of companies are set to have a private cloud completely virtualised central datacentre in place. Almost a third have already implemented a private cloud with a further 20% expecting to have done so within the next two years. Security was seen as the primary barrier to cloud adoption with 58% of respondents believing security concerns prevented greater implementation. Performance of the cloud model was also viewed as a challenge with 39% of respondents viewing performance issues as a barrier to further adoption. this research its clear that a combination of cloud and private data centres is becoming the primary model for enterprise IT.
The aim of a cloud archive service is to provide a data storage environment as a service that is optimised for long-term data retention, security and compliance with data regulation policies.
Washington, DC -- Once in the cloud archive, data must be easily searchable via metadata; protected from overwrites or tampering; and provide client- or legally specified, automatically applied data retention policies. You must also have confidence that your data is in safe hands and protected by sound disaster recovery systems.
The advantages of cloud archiving become clear when you look at the cost of implementation and maintenance of private mass archival storage, especially for organisations with large data retention obligations. Ownership of private archive infrastructure is a costly and management-intensive exercise. Due to the inherently long-term nature of archive storage, multiple hardware refreshes will be required throughout the lifecycle of the data, support contracts must be maintained, and staff turnover taken into consideration. With cloud archiving, by contrast, there are many choices available with regard to how and where archives are hosted and how users can access their archived data.
Hybrid cloud archiving vs fully cloud-based services
Hybrid cloud archiving is one step toward the cloud from the traditional in-house approach. Archived data that may require high-speed access is retained internally while lower-priority archive data is moved to low-cost, cloud-based archive storage.
A fully cloud-based archiving infrastructure, on the other hand, is a viable option that is especially suited to organisations that don’t have the experience or resources to maintain private archiving storage infrastructure.
In deciding between hybrid cloud archiving and a fully cloud-based archive service, there are a number of questions arise that will govern your final choice. These include:
Are the data indexing, searching, retention and legal compliance aspects of the service compatible with our requirements?
Should the archive reside in the public or private cloud space?
What are the implications of this choice for data security and disaster recovery?
The best way to illustrate how archiving solutions address these questions is to take a look at some cloud archive products.
Vendor cloud archive offerings
Cloud Caboodle. The first company to offer a commercial cloud archiving solution was Cloud Caboodle with its Virtual File Store service. Virtual File Store set the foundation for the cloud data archiving market with full data retention policies, WORM capability, 100% up-time, access control, and in-depth audit and reporting functions.
The Virtual File Store system includes an appliance that uses encrypted disks to gather the initial content defined for archiving at the customer site. The disks are then shipped to an off-site data storage facility in the US and synchronised to the Cloud Caboodle private cloud.
Incremental archiving is achieved as customers transfer files to the on-site appliance, which then synchronises that data to the off-site archive. Since this service is tied to the Cloud Caboodle off-site storage infrastructure, it offers organisations a single point of contact for all aspects of the archiving process.
Atempo. The Atempo Digital Archive takes a different approach to file archiving. This software-based solution acts as a storage and data management gateway to provide archiving capabilities to cloud storage platforms like Nirvanix cloud storage services.
The Atempo solution runs on multiple server platforms and allows the addition of the archive as a bottom tier to selected primary storage systems, including NetApp FAS, EMC Celerra and BlueArc, as well as generic NAS-, Windows- and Linux-based storage arrays.
Users have the ability to archive data manually or by automated rules, and the product has extensive metadata capability to allow fast searching and data retrieval. It has the ability to handle millions of files and is used by, for example, the National Film Board of Canada to manage its huge film archives.
The Atempo Digital Archive also allows users to control how their data is archived, managed and retained and leverages a selected range of cloud storage services as a raw disk resource.
StorSimple and Nasuni. Both meanwhile, offers a hardware appliance-based solution called the Cloud Tiering Appliances. These products offer the ability to archive to cloud services based on the EC2 platform, with support planned for non-EC2-based services this year.
This allows organisations to reduce their storage costs as public cloud storage is available for pennies per gigabyte and economies of scale can be had when dealing with large amounts of data. The Cloud Tiering Appliance primary storage systems as well.
Cloud Caboodle, which specializes in virtualization, cloud storage, Backup, archive, computing and related issues for data protection. We have authored of hundreds of article on the subject of Data Protection. Follow us on Twitter @cloudcaboodle. For more information contact us at (877) 904-4347 or email info@cloudcaboodle.com
Tags: EMC, Equallogic, EVA, NetApp, HDS, HP, Dell, Data Domain, Quantum, iSCSI SAN, FC SAN, NAS, Dedupe, Netbackup, Backup Exec, VMware, Cloup Storage, i365, Mozy, SNIA, i365, Nasuni, StorSimple, TwinStrater, Sonian, Gartner Magic Quadrant, Nirvanix, Amazon S3, EC2, Rackspace, Microsoft Windows Azure 365, Enterprise Cloud Storage, Cloud Gateway, TwinStrata, Egnyte, Mimosa, Iron Mountain, Evault, SaaS, price, cost, dedupe, disk to disk, Symantec, EnterpriseVault, NetBackup appliance, Backup Exec, Veritas, SSD, vRanger, Veeam, VMware, Hybrid, iCloud, SharePoint, Storage-as-a-Service, Commvault, Big Data, SLA, iCloud, Riverbed Whitewater, Steelhead, storage appliance, WAN, Iron Mountain, Mimosa Nearstore
CIOs the world over who do business with US organisations do so under the shadow of the US Patriot Act.
Boston, MA -- It has proven a thorn in the side of globalisation; this month members of the European Parliament demanded to know what lawmakers intend to do about the conflict between the European Union's Data Protection Directive and the Patriot Act. The calls come after Microsoft admitted it may be forced to hand over European customers' data on its Cloud service to US authorities and may also be compelled by the Patriot Act to keep details of any such data transfer secret.
Microsoft is hardly alone in this regard. As a US company, Nivanix, Rackspace and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are subject to the US Patriot Act and the data it manages may be accessed by the US government regardless of where it is stored around the world.
What’s a CIO to do? The answer, according to Cloud Caboodles CTO, Brian McCarthy is to encrypt private data for transit to the Cloud — and to employ best practice when it comes to classifying data.
“We take privacy very seriously,” McCarthy told this CIO editor. “For any subpoena we receive, we notify customers, effectively giving them the ability to seek an injunction.”
Amazon uses the US Safe Harbor provisions to notify customers. The risk for CIOs, however, occurs when Cloud providers are bound to keep details of data transfers secret. By encrypting data where privacy is an issue, McCarthy said, CIOs can regain a measure of control.
“The whole thing is moot if the data is encrypted,” he said. “Then they [the CIO] can interact with the enforcement agency.
“We need to obey the laws in the countries we operate in but at the same time we value the privacy of our customers.”
McCarthy said that while most governments have an obligation to protect their citizens, they also have a duty that any regulations they put in place do not inhibit innovation.
“There is a careful balance to ensure they’re not inhibiting business creation at the same time, that regulations don’t adversely affect the competitive advantage that Cloud brings,” he said.
“A coffee shop, ramen and a laptop — these days that’s all you need to start a company.”
CIOs are increasingly using Cloud services such as Cloud Caboodle to help enterprise IT strategies, be that moving old hardware off the books, or helping to manage risks in mergers and acquisitions.
“It’s not so much about efficiency, it’s about looking at security,” McCarthy said.
Cloud storage is also being used for business continuity planning, making use of functions such as geographic replication and fine-grain disaster recovery.
“We used to have one style of business continuity for the whole company – it was the only way to be cost effective. And, at best, it was updated once a year and the CIO had hardly any chance to test it.
Certainly, CIOs are using Cloud technology to innovate and move business units faster to market.
“As long as CIOs’ only task was to cut costs, they would never become a strategic player. The Cloud really turns this around,” McCarthy said. “And, in most cases, the business units are not concerned about Cloud Caboodle services; they’re concerned with what runs on top of that.”
The trick is to ensure the baby isn’t thrown out with the bathwater. Researchers in Germany, for example, recently found abundant security problems within Amazon's Cloud-computing services due to its customers either ignoring or forgetting published security tips.
The researches from Technische Universität Darmstadt said the ease of use of Amazon's service results in people creating virtual machines without following the detailed security guidelines.
Cloud Caboodle, which specializes in virtualization, cloud storage, Backup, archive, computing and related issues for data protection. We have authored of hundreds of article on the subject of Data Protection. Follow us on Twitter @cloudcaboodle. For more information contact us at (877) 904-4347 or email info@cloudcaboodle.com
Tags: EMC, Equallogic, EVA, NetApp, HDS, HP, Dell, Data Domain, Quantum, iSCSI SAN, FC SAN, NAS, Dedupe, Netbackup, Backup Exec, VMware, Cloup Storage, i365, Mozy, SNIA, i365, Nasuni, StorSimple, TwinStrater, Sonian, Gartner Magic Quadrant, Nirvanix, Amazon S3, EC2, Rackspace, Microsoft Windows Azure 365, Enterprise Cloud Storage, Cloud Gateway, TwinStrata, Egnyte, Mimosa, Iron Mountain, Evault, SaaS, price, cost, dedupe, disk to disk, Symantec, EnterpriseVault, NetBackup appliance, Backup Exec, Veritas, SSD, vRanger, Veeam, VMware, Hybrid, iCloud, SharePoint, Storage-as-a-Service, Commvault, Big Data, SLA, iCloud, Riverbed Whitewater, Steelhead, storage appliance, WAN
The cloud isn't just for application delivery, it's also a potential storage target as well.
Irvine, CA -- Networking vendor Riverbed (NASDAQ: RVBD), this week is growing its Whitewater cloud storage solution with new capabilities and partnerships. Whitewater was first announced in November of 2010 as a hardware appliance for storage acceleration.
"We're expanding with different frontends and backends for Whitewater," Eric Thacker, Director of Product Marketing for Whitewater told InternetNews.com. "There is a lot of buzz around cloud storage right now and people are looking at it to help get them away from the short comings of tape and customer owned disks."
Thacker added that the cloud can provide better levels of storage service at lower cost than on-premise solutions. That said, there are still some challenges when it comes to using the cloud for storage. One of those challenges is the speed with which storage data can be transferred to and from the cloud. That's where Whitewater comes into play as a storage acceleration technology for the cloud.
"Whitewater is a drop in solution for customers that want to connect their current data centers to the cloud but don't want to completely change how their data centers operate," Thacker. "The nice thing about what we're announcing now is that we're expanding the base that can take advantage of the Whitewater benefits."
With Whitewater, Riverbed has included acceleration and de-duplication features that are specifically built for storage traffic. In contrast, Riverbed's Steelhead product lineup is a more generic WAN acceleration solution for all types of data.
As part of the Whitewater product update, Riverbed is upping the version number of its underlying storage acceleration operating system to Whitewater OS 1.1. The primary different between Whitewater OS 1.1 and the initial 1.0 version is expanded support for third party storage systems. When Whitewater first launched, there was support for Symantec NetBackup, EMC Atmos and IBM's Tivoli Storage Manager as well as Amazon's S3 storage service. Riverbed is now expanding Whitewater to support EMC NetWorker, Quest vRanger, and CA ARCserve Backup. Whitewater is now also supported on the Nirvanix Storage Delivery Network (SDN). "The benefits of this solution is that customers can move data into the cloud faster and they download data faster," Steve Zivanic, VP of marketing from Nirvanix told InternetNews.com. "From the Nirvanix perspective it's like putting a Ferrari front-end to our enterprise cloud."
Cloud Caboodle, which specializes in virtualization, cloud storage, Backup, archive, computing and related issues for data protection. We have authored of hundreds of article on the subject of Data Protection. Follow us on Twitter @cloudcaboodle. For more information contact us at (877) 904-4347 or email info@cloudcaboodle.com
Tags: EMC, Equallogic, EVA, NetApp, HDS, HP, Dell, Data Domain, Quantum, iSCSI SAN, FC SAN, NAS, Dedupe, Netbackup, Backup Exec, VMware, Cloup Storage, i365, Mozy, SNIA, i365, Nasuni, StorSimple, TwinStrater, Sonian, Gartner Magic Quadrant, Nirvanix, Amazon S3, EC2, Rackspace, Microsoft Windows Azure 365, Enterprise Cloud Storage, Cloud Gateway, TwinStrata, Egnyte, Mimosa, Iron Mountain, Evault, SaaS, price, cost, dedupe, disk to disk, Symantec, EnterpriseVault, NetBackup appliance, Backup Exec, Veritas, SSD, vRanger, Veeam, VMware, Hybrid, iCloud, SharePoint, Storage-as-a-Service, Commvault, Big Data, SLA, iCloud, Riverbed Whitewater, Steelhead, storage appliance, WAN