Dropbox apparently dropped the ball on Monday after anyone could log into any account with any password for about four hours.
Orlando Florida -- The event was described as a “major security fail” by BusinessInsider for the cloud backup service. The problem was blamed on a “bug” by Dropbox’s CTO Arash Ferdowsi. In an official company blog post, the company explains it updated some code that in turn “introduced a bug affecting our authentication mechanism.” “We discovered this at 5:41pm and a fix was live at 5:46pm. The number of users ~250,000 logged in during that period, some of whom could have logged into an account without the correct password. As a precaution, we ended all logged in sessions,” according to Ferdowsi.
In addition, the company is investigating if any accounts were improperly accessed. If accounts were improperly accessed, the account owner will be notified.
“This should never have happened. We are scrutinizing our controls and we will be implementing additional safeguards to prevent this from happening again,” Ferdowsi said. “We are sorry for this and regardless of how many people were ultimately affected, any exposure at all is unacceptable to us. We will continue to provide regular updates,” he added.
But the apology wasn’t enough for some Dropbox users who wanted greater transparency. Tony Webster posted on the company’s blog that the events were “completely unacceptable” and required “hourly updates until you know exactly what happened.”
“When security is critical to your offering, you should be running unit tests on every deployment and additional security tests. This clearly indicates the need for re-engineering Dropbox security,” Webster added. “As to moving forward, every single Dropbox customer should be getting an e-mail right now about this – not hearing about it from other sources or from a seemingly calm-toned blog post. Dropbox hasn't even tweeted about this a full 24 hours after it happened. I know I would like disclosure of every single action happening on my Dropbox account during the four hours anybody could access it, and I need that information immediately,”
Dropbox is a free service that lets users bring documents, photos and videos anywhere and share them. As of earlier this year, over 25 million users had joined Dropbox and use the service to save over 200 million files daily. Dropbox has paying customers in 175 countries and more than half of Dropbox users reside outside of the United States, according to a company statement. Earlier this year, TMCnet reported that the Federal Trade Commission received a complaint that Dropbox was misleading its users about the security and privacy of data. Dropbox allegedly “deduplicates” the files users store online, security researcher Christopher Soghoian reported on a blog post, TMCnet said.
Brian McCarthy is CEO of a Cloud Caboodle, which specializes in virtualization, cloud storage, computing and related issues for data protection. He is also the author of hundreds of article on the subject of Data Protection. Follow Brian McCarthy on Twitter @cloudcaboodle, or contact us at: info@cloudcaboodle.com For more information contact us at (877) 904-4347 or email info@cloudcaboodle.com
For more information call (800) 557-6540 x111, click www.cloudcaboodle.com or join us on Twitter @CloudCaboodle
Office in Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, gartner magic quadrant, New York, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, Texas, California, Arizona, and Colorado. Magic Quadrant. EMC VnX, VMAX, Data Domain, Cloud Storage, Backup, Archive, HP, Dell, Azure, Amazon, Rackspace, vmWare, Cisco, Virtual Data centers, Disaster Recovery, EVault, Mozy, NetApp, IBM, Network Storage, Networker, Commvault, NetBackup, Backup Exec 2012, SSD, LTO-6, Tape Library, Exagrid, Quantum, de-dupe, sync to cloud, free, trade in, cheap, storage, CA Arcserve, Windows 8 whitepaper, case study, education, government icloud iphone competition storsimple cheap quote strongbox laptop smartphone ipad mini backup data protection RAIN Enterprise-grade Online Backup, Recovery, Cloud Storage TwinStrata, Egnyte
Even if your data is secure, one glitch with a cloud computer provider could scare off your customers
Ft. Walton Beach, Florida -- Like many road warriors, I often catch up with work-related reading on the plane, and on a recent flight to the U.S. from London, I was proud of myself for squeezing the maximum work value per pound out of my carry-on materials, which included e-books and other lightweight techno platforms.
But when I pulled the Kindle from my bag, it looked as though a child had scribbled on it with a black marker. The screen was stone dead. Next out was my iPad: One click produced the cover of the book I planned to read during my nine-hour flight, and the second click revealed that the book had not been downloaded. All I had was the cover art. Out came the trusty laptop, but the battery promptly expired.
This experience reminded me of one of the crucial issues surrounding the cloud-computing phenomenon.
Cloud computing offers a value proposition based on convenient services that you pay for as you go. Customized solutions can be offered in a flexible and secure environment. Companies can offload their noncore technologies and focus on their core businesses, providing a better product for their customers.
But cloud computing is based on the premise that users will always have access to the cloud service. Managers need to ask themselves what would happen if the service were unavailable. What if the cable from their internet provider were cut or as has happened with alarming frequency lately the service were disrupted by hackers or technical glitches?
The key issue is access to the data. Servers and technology can be found at secondary sites, but if the data is locked in the cloud, the business's ability to function may be severely compromised. On my plane, which had no Wi-Fi, I was without access to the source data. The format of the data on the Kindle probably wasn't compatible with other devices, even if I could have extracted it and the software licenses had allowed it. I did have the data (the book) on my iPhone, but reading a book on an iPhone screen didn't appeal to me and I had no way to connect the phone to the iPad.
A fellow passenger told me my quandary had put him off investing in such a device, which brings me to another point: Even if your data is secure, your customers might be scared off if they heard that your cloud provider had suffered an event like the outage that occurred on Amazon's Web Services platform.
While some AWS clients such as Netflix were unaffected, the errors within AWS's Relational Database Service prevented some companies, including Foursquare and Reddit, from performing at full capacity. In the eyes of many executives and their customers, this type of outage severely damages the perception of the cloud as a citadel. Clearly, hack attacks and data-lockout scenarios make assessing and managing the risks of the cloud a very complex proposition.
So far, few organizations have stepped up to help companies understand and deal with these risks, so your company will probably have to take on the task itself. First, managers need to ask vendors where and how the data would be stored and how the vendors would guarantee the data's availability. Second, companies should bring in specialists who are well versed in the technical issues of cloud platforms to closely read the service-level agreements offered by vendors. Like most terms-and-conditions contracts in the tech world, these SLAs tend to be complex and to strongly favor the vendors. The specialists should work in conjunction with corporate technology leaders and, if need be, the board of directors to assess the value of the vendors' offerings.
Next, managers should consider cloud-based processes along two dimensions: operational dependence and risk tolerance. Your biggest concern is with processes that the organization is highly dependent on and that have a low risk tolerance—in the case of an airline, for example, the reservation system. Placing these processes in the cloud would require fail-safe, redundant solutions that can be accessed via a second vendor. This level of duplication, known as cross-cloud backup, allows companies to move their data from one cloud (such as Amazon S3) to another (for example, Microsoft Azure) and must be built into the strategic planning of any move to the cloud.
Cloud computing is the future. It is winning over entire industries including traditional late adopters such as health care, says Brian McCarthy CEO of Cloud Caboodle a eight year Cloud Services Provider. The keys to success are careful planning of a migration strategy and understanding that the cloud approach is adolescent in places (remember the early days of the internet?) and that problems will occur. If you're still window shopping, it's time to start catching up on your reading about the cloud. But if you do so on a plane, remember to take a real book along, too.
Brian McCarthy is CEO of a Cloud Caboodle, which specializes in virtualization, cloud storage, computing and related issues for data protection. He is also the author of hundreds of article on the subject of Data Protection. For more information call (800) 557-6540 x111, click www.cloudcaboodle.com or join us on Twitter @CloudCaboodle
Office in Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, gartner magic quadrant, New York, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, Texas, California, Arizona, and Colorado. Magic Quadrant. EMC VnX, VMAX, Data Domain, Cloud Storage, Backup, Archive, HP, Dell, Azure, Amazon, Rackspace, vmWare, Cisco, Virtual Data centers, Disaster Recovery, EVault, Mozy, NetApp, IBM, Network Storage, Networker, Commvault, NetBackup, Backup Exec 2012, SSD, LTO-6, Tape Library, Exagrid, Quantum, de-dupe, sync to cloud, free, trade in, cheap, storage, CA Arcserve, Windows 8 whitepaper, case study, education, government icloud iphone competition storsimple cheap quote strongbox laptop smartphone ipad mini backup data protection RAIN Enterprise-grade Online Backup, Recovery, Cloud Storage TwinStrata, Egnyte
Tampa, Florida -- Hybrid cloud appliances represent an evolution in cloud storage and have become the bridge between on-premises enterprise applications and the cloud. Simply put, they integrate cloud storage into enterprise applications without forcing companies to move their enterprise applications into the cloud. Hybrid cloud storage has become the preferred solution to address concerns about having to rewrite applications, cloud latency, bandwidth, security and data control.
Additionally, these appliances provide a consolidated storage architecture for companies looking for a simple way to provision remote locations or deal with the IT challenges of mergers and acquisitions. The hybrid cloud architecture can provide a standard storage infrastructure or an easy way to implement cloud storage for the first time.
Why cloud storage?
Hybrid cloud storage for primary storage may make sense for the data center to consider for a number of reasons. It can provide near unlimited scalability and is simpler, easier and less expensive to implement. It enables storage to be bought and paid for when it’s used and moves storage infrastructure costs to a lower cost OpEx category. Putting snapshots of data into the cloud also gets data offsite for data protection and DR requirements. Cloud storage as a solution for primary and secondary data, as opposed to functioning as a virtual tape backup target, has generated some questions with users around application compatibility, bandwidth required to provide adequate performance and potential control and security concerns.
Hybrid cloud solutions addresses these issues by offering:
1.A standards-based iSCSI interface to transparently integrate existing on-premises applications
2.Tiered storage comprised of Solid State Disks (SSDs), SAS drives and elastic cloud storage ensuring the least latency for frequently accessed data
3.Deduplication, compression and TCP optimization minimize WAN traffic
4.Military-grade encryption for all block data stored in the cloud with keys that the customer enters directly into the appliance; neither the hybrid cloud appliance vendor nor the cloud provider have access to the keys
Hybrid cloud solutions also dramatically simplify storage infrastructure overall and bring additional significant value in several use cases.
Consolidated storage stack
Most storage infrastructures are comprised of several hardware and software components, including a primary storage array and a secondary or archive storage capacity to reduce the amount of primary storage consumed. There is also a data protection scheme that typically includes a software application with disk and tape components. Finally, most environments will have a mechanism to take data offsite for disaster recovery, either by transporting tapes or replicating data to a remote storage system. Each of the components in this infrastructure stack must be bought, integrated and operated, and then maintained and upgraded as needed. A hybrid cloud system can offer a way to combine these systems and functions into a single appliance that provides intelligence in a data center appliance and leverages cloud storage. In the process it can save CapEx, OpEx and often results in better performance and more comprehensive data protection.
Hybrid cloud storage solutions, like the StorSimple 5000 and 7000 Series, use an iSCSI storage appliance to provide enterprise class performance to local users and applications. These appliances rank data at the block level according to access history, age and data relationship to keep the ‘working set’ on the fastest storage tier if it is used frequently, automatically and transparently migrating less important data to slower tiers of storage. On the back end, they provide an ‘onramp’ to the cloud storage provider, handling all protocol translation and leveraging deduplication, compression and WAN optimization to minimize latency and bandwidth. Active archiving, enables large volumes to be tiered to the cloud with thin provisioning with always-on access. As a block storage device, these hybrid appliances can also support applications that don’t run on a NAS, providing enterprise performance.
In addition to enabling cloud connectivity, these appliances can also simplify data protection through the use of snapshots and clones (independent copies created from snapshots). This process can provide fast, online restores replacing backup and dedupe appliances altogether, which must replicate data to a second system at a remote site.
The result of this consolidation is a reduction in acquisition and operational costs as the number of ‘moving parts’ in the storage stack is simplified and integrated. It also means fewer systems that IT must learn to manage as procedures and best practices are standardized. This has the effect of improving IT performance and uptime while it lowers storage costs enterprise wide. Several use cases are especially strong for leveraging the simplicity of hybrid cloud solutions.
Remote offices
Companies that have many remote offices are tasked with deploying a set of virtual machines and storage infrastructure in each location as new offices are opened. By leveraging the consolidation provided by a hybrid cloud architecture, corporate IT can roll out a complete infrastructure, including primary storage, backup, disaster recovery and reference data archives with a single storage appliance. This consolidation not only saves acquisition and operating costs, but provides a simple, compliant infrastructure that remote office personnel can simply manage.
Acquisitions
Mergers and acquisitions can be a complex process for corporate IT organizations that must roll out a standard infrastructure to new locations. For many, combining corporate IT departments means weeks or months of struggling to make different systems integrate and forcing users to endure substandard performance or poor IT responsiveness. A hybrid cloud solution, like StorSimple, provides a cost effective, single box solution that can be easily deployed in new data centers or offices. By using a standard set of virtual machines and replacing multiple existing systems with a single hybrid cloud storage appliance, the integration time is cut dramatically.
Even for companies not faced with combining IT systems or opening new offices, a hybrid cloud architecture still offers a number of benefits. It can reduce infrastructure costs and simplify management of storage and data protection processes, something that should appeal to every IT organization. It can also provide a way to reduce the complexity of cloud storage and bring the benefits of data sharing, offsite retention, pay-as-you-go scalability to companies sooner.
Brian McCarthy is CEO of a Cloud Caboodle, which specializes in virtualization, cloud storage, computing and related issues for data protection. He is also the author of hundreds of article on the subject of Data Protection. For more information call (800) 557-6540 x111, click www.cloudcaboodle.com or join us on Twitter @CloudCaboodle
Office in Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, gartner magic quadrant, New York, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, Texas, California, Arizona, and Colorado. Magic Quadrant. EMC VnX, VMAX, Data Domain, Cloud Storage, Backup, Archive, HP, Dell, Azure, Amazon, Rackspace, vmWare, Cisco, Virtual Data centers, Disaster Recovery, EVault, Mozy, NetApp, IBM, Network Storage, Networker, Commvault, NetBackup, Backup Exec 2012, SSD, LTO-6, Tape Library, Exagrid, Quantum, de-dupe, sync to cloud, free, trade in, cheap, storage, CA Arcserve, Windows 8 whitepaper, case study, education, government icloud iphone competition storsimple cheap quote strongbox laptop smartphone ipad mini backup data protection RAIN Enterprise-grade Online Backup, Recovery, Cloud Storage TwinStrata, Egnyte
Gainesville, Florida -- With all of the choices you have in cloud computing, why Cloud Caboodle and i365? It is simple - our personal commitment to deliver solutions that enable you to seamlessly manage your data.
We Keep it Simple
It is the cloud. It is supposed to be simple. We will shield you from the complexity of the infrastructure and make your transition to the cloud quick and easy, for even the most challenging mission critical environments.
Scale Without Migration
Our public and private cloud solutions have the elasticity to grow and change with your business. Our VMware-based platform is the only one able to shift workloads from public to private to hybrid clouds and back again without having to reload data, change IP addresses, or deal with the typical DNS issues.
Proven Experience
Do not worry, we have got your back. We have been deploying customers on the cloud before it was even called cloud hosting. With over 10,000 virtual machines deployed and years of virtualization experience, our team of certified engineers is here to help you 24x7x365.
Mid-Market Pricing
When it comes to the cloud, one size may not fit most. That is why we offer a range of cloud solutions - from self service virtual servers to custom built private or hybrid clouds to best fit your IT needs and your budget.
Choose the Right Path
Not sure which cloud solution is best for you? Let us be your guide. Our proven feasibility study goes beyond compute, storage and network requirements to understand how your business works. So we can configure and deliver the infrastructure, services, and processes that best maps to your needs.
What is more, they will have one throat to choke a single point of contact for all their support needs. This trend is supported by a recent survey conducted by the Enterprise Strategies Group (ESG). In that survey, more than half of the respondents – both small and mid-size businesses indicated that they would prefer to rely on a single vendor for their data protection solutions whenever possible.
All-in-one DP solutions include all of the hardware and software necessary to get up and running quickly:
Hardware: The hardware configuration can vary depending on the type of target customer. Solutions for SMBs are often a network attached storage (NAS) server with two or three terabytes of internal storage. Solutions for mid-size companies are typically server node(s) with SATA or Fibre Channel storage.
Software: All-in-one DP solutions usually come with backup and recovery software. The software may include agents to protect each client, plug-ins for granular protection of applications, management and reporting tools, and a server component that handles the backend processing. Some solutions also include data duplication, compression, encryption, bare-metal recovery, and continuous data protection (CDP) functionality. Depending on the particular solution and vendor, these may cost extra.
Support & Warranty: All-in-one DP solutions will typically include support for the backup application and warranty coverage for the hardware. Additional service offerings are almost always available. These can include 4-hour onsite response for hardware repair, training and certification programs, disaster recovery planning and testing, and software implementation.
There are eight things to consider before you make your decision on which solution to purchase. When evaluating solutions, consider the following:
1. What software is included?
As mentioned above, not all all-in-one solutions are the same. It is important for you to take a look at what software is included in each offering. Some only offer Windows client agents; others charge you extra for data deduplication and/or encryption functionality. It is important to choose a solution that can be adapted to your environment. The best solutions offer broad platform and application support,including protection for Windows, UNIX, Linux and VMware and key applications. Some solutions even let you chose from a menu of client software options for specific platform and application protection. Make sure it also includes some sort of data deduplication. Data duplication is the process of identifying and removing or omitting any duplicate data found in an organizations backup data sets. There are various techniques for duplicating data; most of them will help you improve backup times and use your backend storage more efficiently. If deduplication is already included in your backup solution, you will not have to spend money on a standalone deduplication solution. This will also minimize complexity and make things a little easier to manage. Finally, if you have an aggressive Recovery Time Objective (RTO) for key Windows-based servers, look into a solution that includes bare-metal restore functionality.
2. Who is going to manage the onsite hardware?
Depending on the number of IT resources you have within your organization, you may want to either manage the onsite hardware yourself or outsource the job to experts. If you choose to manage it in-house, make sure that the backup application has an easy-to-use, centralized management console. That way, you can standardize data protection processes universally even across multiple, geographically dispersed locations.
If you lack the IT resources to manage the solutition yourself, consider other options. Some solutions are almost completely hands off and require minimal day-to-day interaction. Some solutions are remotely managed by the vendor, allowing you to concentrate on your business instead of your backup vaults.
3. Can the solutition support geographically distributed operatitions?
Some solutitions require hardware at each and every locatition because they are not optitimized for data transfer over a wide area network (WAN) or other low bandwidth connections. These solutions use up a lot of network resources and take a long time to complete backup jobs, so they are not ideal for companies with distributed operations. Companies with branch offices should only consider solutions with client-side deduplication. Client-side deduplication, also referred to as delta processing, compares the latest backup data against the previous backup job’s data. Since much of the data remains the same from backup to backup, the application will only transmit the new and changed blocks (deltas) found since the last backup. This feature is invaluable for companies backing up over the WAN since it can shorten backup windows and minimize the impact on their network. (Some solutions also perform backend deduplication to further reduce the amount of data stored. These can significantly reduce the storage footprint.)
4. Can the solutition accommodate my estitimated rate of data growth?
Over the next 18-24 months your organizatition will undoubtedly see significant data growth. With all the email traffic, transactions and user files, this is inevitable. Consider a backup and recovery solution that gives you room for future growth.
Some solutitions may require a significant investment in specific branded hardware in order to run deduplication and other space-saving technologies. This reliance on hardware can cost a lot and adversely impact scalability and performance. Some appliances have a fixed amount of storage; if the amount of backup data outgrows the appliance, then you have the hassle of retiring the old appliance and replacing it with a new one. Other solutions scale in one- or two-terabyte nodes. Each node, though, can cost you in excess of $30,000 dollars. This can get terribly expensive, very quickly.Some solutitions are designed to run efficiently and scale without a lot of specialized hardware. These solutions can often rely on software-based optimization technologies to help reduce the amount of backup data processed, transmitted, and ultimately stored on disk. They usually consist of a server head and storage array. The storage can be SATA or SAS and can hold anywhere from 14 to 42 of one-terabytes drives, giving you plenty of room for growth.
It is wise to consider a solutition that can be configured as a Storage Area Network (SAN). This allows you to share the storage with applications other than your backup.
5. Can the solutition give you affordable offsite protectition for DR?
For most companies today, onsite backup is not enough; they need a redundant copy of their backup data to mitigate the risk of a complete site outage. When considering an all-in-one solution, make sure that it gives you the flexibility to replicate to another disk-based vault located at either a designated DR site or the cloud. As costs for disk storage continue to drop and virtualization becomes more popular, 2D2D (disk-to-disk-to-disk) and D2D2C (disk-to-disk-to-cloud) options are becoming increasingly attractive over relatively inefficient and error-prone tape recovery services. And since you have two copies of your backup data – one stored onsite and one stored offsite in the cloud – you can benefit from LAN-speed recoveries; and, in the event of a complete site outage, you can continue to back up to and restore from the offsite location.If you have an aggressive RTO, you may also want to consider replicatiting to a cloud storage service provider that offers a remote disaster recovery service. These services offer a warm-site that is continually standing by, giving you the ability to quickly recover key systems and data if a disaster were to strike. You can get your operations back up and running within a virtual environment within 24 to 48 hours. Some services also offer a team of experts that can guide you through the entire recovery process.
6. What security features does the solution offer?
Encryption is critical for successfully protecting backup data. Most solutions offer encryption, but pay close attention to when and how the backup data is encrypted, as well as the impact on backup and restore times. Only consider solutions that support AES-level encryption. Some solutions offer end-to-end security, allowing you to encrypt your backup data at the source (client), while in transit, and at rest on the disk target. If the backup data is being replicated to an alternate or hosted site, you may also want to look into solutions that allow you to restrict access to any encryption keys associated with the stored data.Also consider the potential impact on speed of backups and restores. While some performance hit may be necessary if encryption is deployed, some vendor solutions may differ in terms of the degree of impact. Learn what the vendor has done to reduce the performance impact of the encryption process.
7. How green is the storage?
Many data centers today are approaching ceilings on available power, cooling, and floor space, so IT administrators are looking into more efficient IT solutions including all-in-one solutions for backup and recovery. Green solutions that are energy efficient in terms of direct power consumption, and cooling requirements are now available. Consider solutions that leverage MAID (Massive Array of Idle Disks) technology.The basic premise of MAID is to step down power consumption on the hard drives when they are not in use – similar to a laptop or desktop PC. A good example of this is Nexsans SATA storage arrays. Nexsan storage systems use multiple power saving modes to balance energy consumption with performance and availability. After a period of inactivity, they can automatically slow the hard drives down to save power. When needed, the hard drives can rapidly return to active I/O duty without incurring a time delay or power spike.
8. Can the solution meet my Recovery Point Objectives (RPO)?
Your ability to achieve a target RPO depends on how frequently you back up your data. If you back up your data once daily at midnight, your RPO is 24 hours. In the event of a system failure, any new or changed data after that point will be lost, so your data exposure is 23 hours and 59 minutes. While this may be acceptable for data kept on a home computer, most businesses require smaller windows of exposure, perhaps down to five minutes. Take this into consideration when shopping around for an all-in-one backup solution. Some all- in-one solutions include continuous data protection (CDP) or near- CDP capabilities. CDP technologies minimize potential data loss by continuously tracking changes and generating recovery points as frequently as every five minutes. This approach represents a tiered recovery architecture – a methodology of applying the right backup strategy and solution that’s appropriate for the data you are backing up. The most mission-critical data, for example, should have backups that include disaster recovery, bare metal restores and continuous data protection. Less valuable data can be backed up with less aggressive frequently and with longer RTOs, reducing costs.
A Case in Point – Medical Business Service
Medical Business Service, a nationwide patient billing services company headquartered in Coral Gables, Florida, recently purchased an all-in-one EVault data protection solution from i365. CIO Syed Faisal chose an all-in-one solution because of the versatility of the EVault backup application and the price.
In the end, the price was right and the technology was there to support our infrastructure, he said, noting, We liked the fact that i365 started bundling a server and storage with EVault Software to create a pre-configured all-in-one appliance. I also liked the fact that i365 was part of Seagate, who is a leader in hard disks and storage.
Faisal has since implemented two EVault Plug-n-Protect appliances, one at the primary data center, and the second ready to be shipped to the companys Georgia office. Backup data will be replicated between the two appliances, to ensure fast recovery from either location. After what he reports was a surprisingly quick implementation process, he couldn’t be happier with the results he’s seen so far.
Conclusion
There are a lot of all-in-one data protection solutions on the market today. They are becoming increasingly popular because they are so easy and economical to procure, deploy, and maintain. But make sure to take a look under the hood as not all solutions are the same. It is best to go with a vendor that offers flexibility and includes a range of services. You want to be able to grow with the solution as your needs change and environment becomes more complex.
Brian McCarthy is CEO of a Cloud Caboodle, which specializes in virtualization, cloud storage, computing and related issues for data protection. He is also the author of hundreds of article on the subject of Data Protection. For more information call (800) 557-6540 x111, click www.cloudcaboodle.com or join us on Twitter @CloudCaboodle
Office in Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, gartner magic quadrant, New York, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, Texas, California, Arizona, and Colorado. Magic Quadrant. EMC VnX, VMAX, Data Domain, Cloud Storage, Backup, Archive, HP, Dell, Azure, Amazon, Rackspace, vmWare, Cisco, Virtual Data centers, Disaster Recovery, EVault, Mozy, NetApp, IBM, Network Storage, Networker, Commvault, NetBackup, Backup Exec 2012, SSD, LTO-6, Tape Library, Exagrid, Quantum, de-dupe, sync to cloud, free, trade in, cheap, storage, CA Arcserve, Windows 8 whitepaper, case study, education, government icloud iphone competition storsimple cheap quote strongbox laptop smartphone ipad mini backup data protection RAIN Enterprise-grade Online Backup, Recovery, Cloud Storage TwinStrata, Egnyte
Ft. Meyers, Florida -- The march of technology is starting to shake up one of the most important relationships that CIOs have the one with the chief financial officer.
CIOs need to start changing the way they talk with CFOs, not just at budget time, but throughout the year, CIOs and experts say. Cloud computing and consumerization trends, especially, are changing the nature of corporate IT and, with it, the way CIOs structure their IT budgets.
This shift is in its early days, but forward-looking CIOs are beginning to think of themselves as providers of services rather than infrastructure. As such, they supervise operating expenditures, not capital expenditures, and they approach the CFO as partners, not supplicants, in business-investment decisions.
Robert Petrie, vice president of IT at Pharmaceutical Product Development, which runs clinical trials for big drug companies, says decisions about provisioning new technologies are made based on what makes the most sense from a business standpoint and from a financial standpoint. But thanks to cloud-based infrastructure, software as a service and employee-supplied devices, these decisions have different budget implications than they used to, including how IT investments are governed and who pays the bills.
Questions of Cash Flow
Cloud computing offers CIOs the opportunity to transform investments in corporate computer systems from capital expenditures into operating expenditures. Instead of making a multimillion-dollar up-front investment in software licenses and computer-room servers, companies can arrange to pay for the same capabilities with monthly per-user contracts. That means that when you want to deploy a new system, you have more funding options.
Getting new technology in monthly installments may benefit companies that need to cut capital expenses. For example, Joe Drouin, senior vice president and CIO at temporary-help giant Kelly Services (KELYA), says that when he joined the company three years ago, We were suffering from a depreciation hangover caused by a huge PeopleSoft implementation. That project will not be completed until 2014, at a 10-year cost of between $100 million and $110 million.
Years of heavy investment in servers and software had tied up millions of dollars, leaving Kelly with a limited ability to make new investments when business slumped during the Great Recession. The dramatic revenue declines during the recession had a painful effect on companies with high fixed costs. Many found that multi-year depreciation of capital goods can result in big operating losses when gross profits shrink. Fixed costs and cyclical revenue are a bad combination.
When temporary hiring dried up, Kelly reported huge losses. It slashed capital spending, most of which goes for IT, from $31 million in 2008 to just $11 million in 2010.
Drouin says cloud computing provided a way to wean the IT department from capital spending right when Kelly needed it. Kelly now uses Salesforce.com for CRM and the Force.com platform as its principal development environment. The company hosts its Microsoft (MSFT) email and SharePoint collaboration applications in the cloud as well. All the software is paid for as an operating expense.
The necessity of the recession, when our capital pool dried up, fueled our acceleration into the cloud, Drouin says. The capital spending in his budget this year is about half what it was at its peak in 2007, even though Kelly is implementing what he considers a normal amount of new IT initiatives.
Many companies also prefer to devote capital expenditures to revenue-generating projects like new factories or rail cars, rather than spend the budget on computers that don’t have a measurable impact on revenue.
But for some companies, avoiding capital spending isn’t a priority, and options such as leasing or making annual payments to an outsourcer provide a way to avoid making capital expenditures up front. Especially for large organizations, which have access to low-interest loans and predictable depreciation schedules, whether to lay out capital for IT may simply be a question of cash flow.
In some cases, expensing might even be a mistake. Chris Potts, an independent IT strategist based in London, says that if an IT plan is part of a major corporate project like building a big factory, trying to expense IT could affect depreciation schedules for the whole plan.
The decision depends on “the current cost of capital and alternative investment vehicles, says Craig Symons, an analyst with Forrester Research (FORR) and former CIO at Gartner (IT). Still, he says, the cloud provides flexibility to scale up or down. When a company controls its own infrastructure, either you spend a lot up front and depreciate or you commit to multi-year operating leases.
Bill Bowers, CFO of Newline Products, a maker of whiteboards and bulletin boards that does $15 million in annual sales, says that when he joined the company in 2008, it was planning a $250,000 installation of an ERP system from SAP. As he investigated the costs and funding dried up, he switched to NetSuite’s cloud-based ERP solution. Now Newline pays $99 per user per month, after an up-front $85,000 investment for customization and training.
Bowers, who used to work in finance for Motorola (MOT), overseeing corporate IT functions in Asia, says that for big companies, the cloud may not have a significant financial benefit. When evaluating the alternatives, he found that maybe from a payback analysis it is a toss-up, between buying or renting. But he says, when you are in the cash flow world, cloud is the way to go.
Who Makes IT Decisions?
In addition to conversations about cash flow, the cloud raises questions of governance and cost allocation. Potts, the London-based consultant, notes that many companies stipulate board-level review for expenditures of a certain size, which assures that major IT initiatives get a careful vetting. He says that with piecemeal spending on cloud initiatives, the amounts spent might never trigger the appropriate review. If the CIO is being responsible to investors, then they should want that kind of review, he says. The discipline of thinking about the budget creates governance.
Steven Finnerty is vice president of technology and vendor services with Global Information Services at Applied Materials (AMAT), which makes semiconductor, display and solar photo voltaic equipment. Finnerty likes paying for cloud services by the drink because the companys business is cyclical, and he can adjust IT costs as business conditions change. But he agrees that the ability to expense IT monthly using a credit card could allow a business unit head to bring in new technology without giving the IT staff a chance to clear it and make sure it fits with the company’s security standards or data-preservation policies.
When business units take things into their own hands, they are not conscious of the need for architectural compliance or having a continuity plan, says Forresters Symons. CIOs need to make sure the CFO understands why such rogue purchases could threaten the companys regulatory compliance or affect the value of other investments. But, Symons says, CIOs also “need to view themselves as solutions brokers based on the needs of business and deliver the optimal solution.”
Drouin at Kelly Services says that the flexibility the cloud gives IT to move quickly can eliminate one excuse business units use to provide themselves with technology on their own. That helps assure that IT spending goes through the IT budget. “It’s made the rogue IT thing become kind of moot” at Kelly, he says. Rogue IT spending by department heads was in some ways our own fault because the businesses stopped asking us for quick things. We didn’t deliver.
But the cloud does not only change the conversation about who decides what technology to buy; it also shifts the discussion of how IT costs are allocated. CIOs are divided on whether the new IT architecture always makes assigning costs easier.
Chargebacks, for example, are the bane of many CIOs existence. They can lead to contentious arguments with business group heads who think they are being overcharged for IT, hurting their profitability measures.
To hear some CIOs tell it, one of the greatest benefits of cloud computing may be that it puts a stop to such arguments. “With cloud adoption and pay-per-consumption, we’re able to very granularly capture costs and charge them back to the point of value,” says Drouin. “It’s a real shift.”
In the past, he says, the IT department calculated charges primarily by multiplying total costs by each business unit’s percentage of corporate revenue. Then you have discussions with people arguing that some divisions were more data intensive, so they should pay more. Now he can charge more precisely, based on the services business units consume. If you need 200 seats of Force.com, heres what it’s going to cost. Drouin adds, The COO, who I report to, and the CFO saw it drove a lot more rigor around the investments. When you pay on the expense line, you cannot have a three-year time to ROI.
But others say it complicates the issue. Like many other IT organizations, The Hartford Financial Services Group (HIG) has been consolidating data centers and centralizing IT to gain economies of scale. That has increased the pressure over chargebacks, because division heads view IT as a service rather than as part of their domain, says Jim Eckerle, executive vice president for strategic initiatives and technology.
Eckerles company has gone from seven data centers to three and will soon have just two one of its own and a failover site run by IBM (IBM). The company takes advantage of cloud-based services to simplify chargebacks, Eckerle says, wherever we can identify a reliable metric to correlate consumption with charges. The Hartford uses Salesforce.com in its wealth-management practice and recently announced that it will move to virtualized desktops hosted by IBM. Yet he says cloud architecture makes chargebacks more difficult. Because Hartford pays on a monthly basis, it is a challenge to estimate its needs to assure the lowest possible price, he says.
Similarly, Otto Doll, CIO with the City of Minneapolis, says that while pay-by-the-sip services such as software are simple to allocate, cloud infrastructure increases the confusion over billing for shared services, including the costs incurred by the IT department in managing its cloud provider. Another problem comes when costs rise due to unforeseeable increases in infrastructure use, such as when citizens flock to city websites for information.
The general public does not have a direct account, Doll observes. If an election is close, and demand [from the public] for access to results leads the cloud provider to increase to 10 servers from five, the cloud provider has to send somebody the bill. Somehow I have to marry up the bill from the cloud with what I pay, and share it equitably across my client base.
Catching Up to Consumers
While you’re figuring out how to govern and budget for cloud services, you also need to help CFOs wrestle with the implications of consumer IT. Like cloud, consumer devices that employees and customers use, along with online applications such as social networking that people use to get their work done, are changing how IT decisions are made and altering the company’s IT footprint.
Corporate IT is not just the computers in the data center anymore. Considered broadly, it is also the personal smartphones that employees use to book a business flight and the home PCs that they use to read emails late at night, says Potts, the independent strategist. The technology does not appear on your books, but it is part of your infrastructure. Consumer IT, therefore, offers CIOs an opportunity to explain that ITs role is much bigger than its annual spending.
If a CFO starts with the IT budget as evidence of the value of IT, that’s a problem. There is an opportunity to redirect people from the size of the budget to the value of the consumers using IT, Potts says.
The CFO needs to know, however, that the value of consumer devices and applications to the enterprise isn’t always easily measured. Sure, you can avoid some investments in end-user devices by letting employees select and use their own smartphones and tablets, says Scott Archibald, IT practice leader with Bender Consulting. Enterprises are looking to make this move because it involves less capital and labor investment.
He notes that supporting consumer devices and keeping them secure can be costly. But he thinks it seems safe to say that the corporate savings will be sufficient to move forward with these models even with an uptick in support costs.
Nevertheless, CIOs say the real value of enabling the use of personal devices is employee satisfaction, which, though it can be measured, is hard to quantify financially. We have tried to shift to letting people bring their own devices, says Drouin of Kelly Services. With SharePoint and email in the cloud, that enabled us to use tablets and smartphones. We could assure proper security. (Read What CFOs Care About Besides Your IT Budget for advice on talking to CFOs about cloud and consumer technology security.)
The popularity of collaboration tools for consumers also affects IT decision making. CIOs say it is important for CFOs to understand the need to invest in corporate collaboration applications, even if it is hard to understand the ROI. Consumers who are used to Facebook chat and sharing videos on YouTube expect to have the same capabilities at work. If the company does not provide them, they will use consumer networks if they think it will help them do their jobs more efficiently.
While using consumer applications may sometimes be appropriate, such as when communicating directly with consumers about your companys products or services, CIOs may need to educate their CFOs about the trade-offs. Companies often worry about employees communicating about business over Facebook simply because it is so easy. Recently, a Rhode Island hospital dismissed a doctor because she had discussed a patient, without naming him or her, on Facebook.
Notes Finnerty of Applied Materials, if it is in social media, you have to get out front and say, We have an offering. Then we can put controls in place for security and compliance. Even clear policies against using public social media will be violated if there is not an alternative. If you say no, it will probably still happen, Finnerty says.
Ken Corriveau is CIO at ad-industry giant Omnicom (OMC), where workers are encouraged to use social media in order to keep up with the consumer world. For him, as for other CIOs, the new IT landscape of consumerization and cloud raises a host of questions, including financial ones. The company may start supporting employee smartphones, but that will require a monthly expense for reimbursements of phone bills. In the cloud, allocating storage expenses is a challenge.
I am having those conversations with the CFO, he says
Brian McCarthy is CEO of a Cloud Caboodle, which specializes in virtualization, cloud storage, computing and related issues for data protection. He is also the author of hundreds of article on the subject of Data Protection. For more information call (800) 557-6540 x111, click www.cloudcaboodle.com or join us on Twitter @CloudCaboodle
Office in Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, gartner magic quadrant, New York, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, Texas, California, Arizona, and Colorado. Magic Quadrant. EMC VnX, VMAX, Data Domain, Cloud Storage, Backup, Archive, HP, Dell, Azure, Amazon, Rackspace, vmWare, Cisco, Virtual Data centers, Disaster Recovery, EVault, Mozy, NetApp, IBM, Network Storage, Networker, Commvault, NetBackup, Backup Exec 2012, SSD, LTO-6, Tape Library, Exagrid, Quantum, de-dupe, sync to cloud, free, trade in, cheap, storage, CA Arcserve, Windows 8 whitepaper, case study, education, government icloud iphone competition storsimple cheap quote strongbox laptop smartphone ipad mini backup data protection RAIN Enterprise-grade Online Backup, Recovery, Cloud Storage TwinStrata, Egnyte
Miami, Florida -- Cloud computing is practically mainstream, according to the latest CIO Economic Impact survey of 291 IT leaders. In fact, nearly half (48 percent) of the CIOs surveyed said they have adopted the government's Cloud First policy, which requires agencies to evaluate cloud options first, over traditional IT approaches, before making any new IT investments.
Cloud budgets reflect this shift, with 48 percent of IT leaders putting more money toward cloud, up from 44 percent in November 2010 and 38 percent in August 2010. More than half (53 percent) of CIOs said they expect to increase their IT budgets overall, up 5 percent from a year ago.
Roberto Dolci, CIO of manufacturer System Logistics, moved his company's payroll system to the cloud, which he says has increased the business's agility and allowed him to "squeeze more out of the same amount of money."
However, while Dolci plans to evaluate other cloud options, he says he'll hold off on moving over more mission-critical applications. The public cloud is "still immature, and that's an understatement," he says.
While 27 percent of survey respondents said shifting to cloud services could result in decreases in IT head counts in the next three years, 49 percent of CIOs expect their staffing numbers to remain the same.
Scott Van Vliet, CTO at Mattel, says moving to the cloud won't affect his company's IT head count, but it will "present an opportunity to reinvest in areas that are lacking focus. People will become more focused on creating value-added features for the business."
Use of mobile applications is also growing, with 67 percent of respondents planning to increase their budgets in this area, up from 53 percent in November 2010. Some 79 percent of CIOs said increased employee productivity is driving the adoption of mobile devices in the enterprise.
Brian McCarthy is CEO of a Cloud Caboodle, which specializes in virtualization, cloud storage, computing and related issues for data protection. He is also the author of hundreds of article on the subject of Data Protection. For more information call (800) 557-6540 x111, click www.cloudcaboodle.com or follow-us on Twitter @CloudCaboodle
Office in Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, gartner magic quadrant, New York, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, Texas, California, Arizona, and Colorado. Magic Quadrant. EMC VnX, VMAX, Data Domain, Cloud Storage, Backup, Archive, HP, Dell, Azure, Amazon, Rackspace, vmWare, Cisco, Virtual Data centers, Disaster Recovery, EVault, Mozy, NetApp, IBM, Network Storage, Networker, Commvault, NetBackup, Backup Exec 2012, SSD, LTO-6, Tape Library, Exagrid, Quantum, de-dupe, sync to cloud, free, trade in, cheap, storage, CA Arcserve, Windows 8 whitepaper, case study, education, government icloud iphone competition storsimple cheap quote strongbox laptop smartphone ipad mini backup data protection RAIN Enterprise-grade Online Backup, Recovery, Cloud Storage TwinStrata, Egnyte
Melbourne, Florida -- The mission critical nature of technology is reflected in the numerous disaster recovery solutions on the market today, although many of these solutions require a large monetary investment, with little flexibility in the actual solution. To alleviate rising costs, many companies are now turning to cloud computing for disaster recovery. The benefit of cloud is that it provides offsite management of data, automatically, and in any location. Here, Brian McCarthy, CEO at Cloud Caboodle, discusses the benefits of using cloud for disaster recovery.
We all recognize the importance that IT systems play in today’s businesses. Therefore, keeping them up and running, as well as ensuring the swift and efficient recovery of these systems, and your data, must be a priority.
Disaster recovery in the cloud is offering companies more options to restore data quickly and effectively than with a traditional disaster recovery model. In the past, companies used manual tape backups, which are cumbersome and unreliable, and even disk backups have to be stored somewhere safe, either onsite or ideally, remotely. Cloud disaster recovery solutions offer hot, warm and cold site options, where a company can choose the how often and in how many locations data is backed up.
Cloud Disaster Recovery Benefits
There has been plenty of news explaining the benefits of the cloud. One area that has not been explored as much as the traditional benefits of cloud is using the cloud for disaster recovery.
Here are a few benefits to think about when considering the cloud for disaster recovery:
• The cloud offers the ability for backups in multiple locations, whether that is around the world, or in the office next door.
• Many companies turn to the cloud due to its low cost. This of course is the same for disaster recovery in the cloud. The cloud allows economies of scale, leading to lower expenses.
• Data can be restored more quickly in the cloud than in other disaster recovery scenarios, because multiple copies of information is kept in sync at multiple locations. (i.e., data is protected as it is created.)
• It is easier to demonstrate compliance in the cloud, as it can provide a more secure infrastructure and more control than an on-premise solution.
• There is more automation in the cloud; so constant babysitting is not necessary.
• At predictable monthly costs, resources can be reserved in the event of an emergency, allowing businesses the ability to function and continue to generate revenue.
Setting Your Metrics
Once you have decided you want to do back up in the cloud, it is important to determine your recovery point objective (RPO), which describes the acceptable amount of data loss measured in time, and recovery time objective (RTO), the amount of time that a business process must be restored after a in order to avoid a break in business continuity (What point-in-time does the data need to be restored to?). After those metrics are decided, you will want to map to the underlying IT systems and infrastructure that support those processes, and begin the backup process.
A Tiered System
One benefit of using cloud computing for disaster recovery is the ability to tier out or prioritize your data and systems, in order to determine how often it is backed up, and in case of a disaster, what needs to be restored first.
Using your RPO and RTO metrics, you should map out what systems and data are most critical, and what areas may be able to be down for a longer period of time without adverse affects.
This tiered system is something that the cloud is an optimal solution to address. Generally with on-premise disaster recovery, companies are locked into buying one type of service that can’t be tiered out. This means that you pay more to constantly backup systems that may not need to be refreshed on an hourly basis.
With the cloud, you can customize a tiered service with a predictable monthly cost, saving investments that can be used for more strategic initiatives for the business. For example, a company that handles an e-commerce site might want to back up their point-of-sale application every 20 minutes, while it may only need to back up an email system once an hour or once a day. A cloud solution will price this accordingly, and allow back up of systems only as often as needed.
Clouds For All Shapes And Sizes
Organizations today are looking for flexibility and control, and the cloud continues to prove its value for organizations of any size. By setting your metrics, and creating a tiered system, organizations will get the disaster recovery solution they want, and have the ability get back up and running more quickly than before.
Brian McCarthy is CEO of a Cloud Caboodle, which specializes in virtualization, cloud storage, computing and related issues for data protection. He is also the author of hundreds of article on the subject of Data Protection. For more information call (800) 557-6540 x111, click www.cloudcaboodle.com or follow-us on Twitter @CloudCaboodle
Office in Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, gartner magic quadrant, New York, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, Texas, California, Arizona, and Colorado. Magic Quadrant. EMC VnX, VMAX, Data Domain, Cloud Storage, Backup, Archive, HP, Dell, Azure, Amazon, Rackspace, vmWare, Cisco, Virtual Data centers, Disaster Recovery, EVault, Mozy, NetApp, IBM, Network Storage, Networker, Commvault, NetBackup, Backup Exec 2012, SSD, LTO-6, Tape Library, Exagrid, Quantum, de-dupe, sync to cloud, free, trade in, cheap, storage, CA Arcserve, Windows 8 whitepaper, case study, education, government icloud iphone competition storsimple cheap quote strongbox laptop smartphone ipad mini backup data protection RAIN Enterprise-grade Online Backup, Recovery, Cloud Storage TwinStrata, Egnyte
Gartner's estimate is it runs about 75 cents to $1 per gigabyte per month on premises storage, whereas cloud services run as low as 3 cents per gigabyte per month
ORLANDO, Florida -- Gartner this week offered some cautionary advice on storage as a service, saying that while services available do offer a low-cost tier of storage, there are sometimes drawbacks to them, such as long latencies and limited bandwidth.
Bandwidth charges can exceed the monthly storage costs, said Gartner analyst Stanley Zaffos, speaking on the topic of the storage cloud during this weeks Gartner IT Infrastructure, Operations and Management Summit here. Yet some disagree, with bandwidth pricing for 100Mbps well under $2,000 and falling.
He said there are public cloud storage services available from Amazon S3, AT&T, Nirvanix, among others. But some vendors have also exited cloud-related businesses, including Iron Mountain, EMC, VaultScape, Cirtas, ParaScale and Seanodes. It is storage market chaos, said Zaffos, adding, it is a difficult market to make money.
Cloud-based storage offers a low-cost metered storage method, and potential customers tend to compare it with the costs they incur in storage on their own corporate premises today. Gartners estimate is it runs about 75 cents to $1 per gigabyte per month on premises storage, whereas cloud services run as low as 3 cents per gigabyte per month, Zaffos said.
While that makes cloud storage look attractive at first glance, there are a lot of variables to consider, he pointed out. The first question is whether certain corporate applications should go into a cloud environment anyway, and the answer is often no for those that are heavily transactional, or are I/O sensitive or involve sensitive data, he said. Much like VMwares experience, not all servers can be virtualized.
Zaffos suggested some alternative routes. One would be making the decision to build a private cloud, noting there are a number of vendors supporting products for this, including EMC, IBM, Mezeo Software, Scale Computing, Caringo, Symantec, Coraid and Cleversafe, among others. He also went on to say private cloud can be significantly more expensive then public ones. He noted going the hybrid route of private/public storage, and vendors supporting that type of architecture includes Nasuni and StorSimple.
Brian McCarthy is CEO of a Cloud Caboodle, which specializes in virtualization, cloud storage, computing and related issues for data protection. He is also the author of hundreds of article on the subject of Data Protection. For more information call (800) 557-6540 x111, click www.cloudcaboodle.com or follow-us on Twitter @CloudCaboodle
Office in Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, gartner magic quadrant, New York, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, Texas, California, Arizona, and Colorado. Magic Quadrant. EMC VnX, VMAX, Data Domain, Cloud Storage, Backup, Archive, HP, Dell, Azure, Amazon, Rackspace, vmWare, Cisco, Virtual Data centers, Disaster Recovery, EVault, Mozy, NetApp, IBM, Network Storage, Networker, Commvault, NetBackup, Backup Exec 2012, SSD, LTO-6, Tape Library, Exagrid, Quantum, de-dupe, sync to cloud, free, trade in, cheap, storage, CA Arcserve, Windows 8 whitepaper, case study, education, government icloud iphone competition storsimple cheap quote strongbox laptop smartphone ipad mini backup data protection RAIN Enterprise-grade Online Backup, Recovery, Cloud Storage TwinStrata, Egnyte
Clearwater, Florida -- In our past two entries in this series we have discussed how Cloud Backup and Primary Cloud storage will change the role of the storage administrator. In this entry we will cover what is potentially one of the most popular initial uses of cloud storage--its use as an archive—and how that affects the storage manager's role and what the main concerns should be.
If you work in IT for a business of almost any size, you have to retain data to meet either a legal requirement or a business need. As we have discussed in the past, an archive is not a backup and they should be maintained separately. This creates a need to develop an archive storage infrastructure. One of the options to consider is the cloud as an archive area. The value of archiving data to a cloud storage provider is you don't have the physical aspects of a separate storage area to manage. You don't have to power or cool it and you don't have to make sure there is enough capacity on it. All of this is handled by the provider once you get the archive out of your building.
The storage administrator still needs to identify which data needs to be moved to the cloud archive. This can be done with manual inspection or by using tools that can help you determine which files or folders have not been accessed for a period of time. There has been issues with these software applications in both the time it takes an agent-less architecture to scan the environment and the resources an agent-based architecture may consume. But as we discuss in our recent article, there are ways to scale agent architectures more effectively than in the past and agent-based architectures are increasingly more reliable. The important component is to have a software application that can deliver the results quickly so you can make data movement decisions.
With an ability to selectively identify candidate data for archive and to leverage a tool that can scale to meet the never-ending requirements of data growth, the next step is to select the cloud architecture. Once again a hybrid architecture makes sense here, something that can cache the data locally on premises and then copy to the cloud storage provider as needed. A hybrid approach may be less critical in an archive situation than it is in a primary storage or even backup situation since copy jobs can easily be queued and recovery speed is not quite as important. A cloud archive appliance does make things easier since data can be copied to it as if it were a NAS target. A hybrid approach may also help with cloud migration issues if that need comes up as well.
In dealing with the cloud storage provider, the administrator has to make sure that the provider has the capabilities to retain information for as long as the company is legally required to keep the information and whether the provider has the ability to transmit and store that data in an encrypted manor. They also have to make sure that the provider can retain that information in the specific way required. For example, if data needs to be in a non-modifiable format you need to make sure that this can be accomplished. Or if data needs to be deleted after a certain number of years, you need to make sure that the provider supports this.
Brian McCarthy is CEO of a Cloud Caboodle, which specializes in virtualization, cloud storage, computing and related issues for data protection. He is also the author of hundreds of article on the subject of Data Protection. For more information call (800) 557-6540 x111, click www.cloudcaboodle.com or follow-us on Twitter @CloudCaboodle
Office in Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, gartner magic quadrant, New York, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, Texas, California, Arizona, and Colorado. Magic Quadrant. EMC VnX, VMAX, Data Domain, Cloud Storage, Backup, Archive, HP, Dell, Azure, Amazon, Rackspace, vmWare, Cisco, Virtual Data centers, Disaster Recovery, EVault, Mozy, NetApp, IBM, Network Storage, Networker, Commvault, NetBackup, Backup Exec 2012, SSD, LTO-6, Tape Library, Exagrid, Quantum, de-dupe, sync to cloud, free, trade in, cheap, storage, CA Arcserve, Windows 8 whitepaper, case study, education, government icloud iphone competition storsimple cheap quote strongbox laptop smartphone ipad mini backup data protection RAIN Enterprise-grade Online Backup, Recovery, Cloud Storage TwinStrata, Egnyte
Daytona Beach, Florida -- In the past cloud storage has been justifiably criticized for being an over hyped technology, but in 2011 cloud storage will move out of the hype stage and become a production solution for many companies. While some will continue to find fault, smart business owners and IT managers will be using cloud storage solutions like Nasuni’s Filer to solve problems and increase productivity.
Thus far most cloud strategies have been focused on using cloud storage for either backup or archive. This was thought of as a safe way to leverage an off-site copy of data. But while this use of the cloud may be considered one of the least risky, because it is a second copy, it may also be one of the least effective. While cloud backup and archive brings benefits like off-site data storage and reduced internal storage requirements, the use of cloud storage in this way is merely an extension of the existing processes, another link in the chain to manage, monitor and maintain. There is still as much local primary storage to manage as before and using cloud storage for the primary data set may be a better alternative. Primary cloud storage can leverage the instinctive built-in backup and disaster recoverability of the cloud and significantly lower the storage administrative costs impacting the local data center.
Cloud Architectures For Success
The key driver for cloud storage solutions that are ready for deployment in 2011 will be those that use a hybrid, on-premise / cloud deployment model. This allows IT managers to leverage the abilities of cloud storage to finally create a tiered storage strategy without the side effects that have prevented adoption in the past. An important ingredient for success is that the users see a single view of all the data. Users historically have not had the time or discipline to manually copy data from one storage area to another. This movement between the local data set and a cloud storage location needs to be automatic, essentially cache like. A hybrid architecture creates an on-premise appliance that caches data locally and then, over time, replicates that data to a cloud storage provider. Because it is a cache the volume of local storage remains relatively small, and growth happens in the cloud. This eliminates much of the time spent managing local storage because tasks like capacity expansion and system upgrades are now the cloud provider’s responsibility, says Brian McCarthy, CEO of Cloud Caboodle of Lake Mary, Florida.
As stated earlier this process also eliminates the need for backup of any cloud based data set. In this architecture data is replicated to the cloud almost as soon as it is created or changed, and as a result it’s protected sooner and probably more securely than by an internal backup process. Also, because the appliance can be easily recreated and started, with the correct authorization, disaster recovery can happen from almost anywhere.
Additionally, because the cache is relatively small and it does not grow (or grows slowly), the investment for it can be made on higher performing storage, like solid state. This allows for a very cost effective use of a high performance but expensive technology, causing users to actually see a performance increase because of cloud storage.
For the hybrid architecture to make sense though, the use case for a cloud storage system has to be right. The ideal use case will be a data set that can be easily segmented between active components and inactive components. The active components are stored on the cache with a backup copy sent to the cloud storage provider. The inactive components would be stored only in the cloud. The most obvious example of this use case is a file server.
A cloud enabled NAS like the Nasuni Filer addresses one of the biggest challenges facing data centers of all sizes; the rate of storage growth, both in terms of capacity and in number of servers. Compounding this is a perceived need to retain discrete file data like those created by office productivity applications. These files are increasing in size, increasing in number and increasing in importance to organizations. The result is an environment that is near fatal to backup applications, millions and millions of files where 80% or more never change but must be retained to satisfy user just in case demands or to address specific industry retention requirements.
Without a cloud enabled solution customers are more frequently leveraging another popular technology, server virtualization, to address their needs for file services. In the virtual server environment it appears easy to start up file server after file server to satisfy user demand. The problem, in addition to server sprawl, is that using an entire OS load to manage a very specific task like file services wastes resources which are particularly valuable in the virtual environment. An alternative for many is to select a NAS, but as we indicated in our article How To Add NAS To a SAN this is typically overkill for office productivity files.
Brian McCarthy is CEO of a Cloud Caboodle, which specializes in virtualization, cloud storage, computing and related issues for data protection. He is also the author of hundreds of article on the subject of Data Protection. For more information call (800) 557-6540 x111, click www.cloudcaboodle.com or follow-us on Twitter @CloudCaboodle
Office in Florida, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, New Jersey, gartner magic quadrant, New York, Massachusetts, Michigan, Ohio, Texas, California, Arizona, and Colorado. Magic Quadrant. EMC VnX, VMAX, Data Domain, Cloud Storage, Backup, Archive, HP, Dell, Azure, Amazon, Rackspace, vmWare, Cisco, Virtual Data centers, Disaster Recovery, EVault, Mozy, NetApp, IBM, Network Storage, Networker, Commvault, NetBackup, Backup Exec 2012, SSD, LTO-6, Tape Library, Exagrid, Quantum, de-dupe, sync to cloud, free, trade in, cheap, storage, CA Arcserve, Windows 8 whitepaper, case study, education, government icloud iphone competition storsimple cheap quote strongbox laptop smartphone ipad mini backup data protection RAIN Enterprise-grade Online Backup, Recovery, Cloud Storage TwinStrata, Egnyte