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The Cloud, Company Size and Data Protection

StorageMojo recently wrote a blog post discussing the results of a study by twinstrata comparing the costs and availability of Google apps and Microsoft Office/Exchange. The study showed that the Google apps were cheaper than MS Office/Exchange for a 20 person firm and the options were similar for a 50 person company. The challenge in the larger company was the increased cost of data loss and downtime. This is a very informative finding and I wanted to highlight it in the context of data protection.

In recent discussions with analysts, I have been asked about the impact of cloud computing in data protection and StorageMojo’s article exemplifies my thoughts. Cloud backup is commonly used for data protection for consumers and small businesses. There are many players in this market such as AmeriVault, Mozy, eVault, Iron Mountain/LiveVault and even Symantec. These are ideal solutions for individuals and small companies who do not have the expertise or time to deal with managing and implementing a traditional backup environment. They also have relatively small volumes of data and straightforward data protection requirements.  While the risks of data loss and downtime mentioned apply equally to public cloud backup, these customers are willing to trade those risks for the simplicity of an automated backup solution.

Larger businesses are very different. They typically have larger IT infrastructures and more detailed data protection requirements. They are also often subject to strict business SLAs and regulatory requirements pertaining to backups. For these customers, a public cloud-based backup solution can be problematic. They cannot tolerate outages and want to control their data through its entire lifecycle. The thought of trusting their data to a third party is problematic regardless of the amount of security involved. Additionally, they may also face bandwidth issues even given the deduplication involved in these remote backup products. For this reason, many large enterprises are creating their own internal clouds for data protection and I will cover this topic in a future post.

My conclusion is similar to StorageMojo’s. Public Cloud-based backup provides a compelling value proposition for smaller environments. These companies value the simplification of backup and offsite processes and are willing to accept some risk of potential data loss or downtime for this benefit. Larger companies are unwilling to accept the risks inherent in today’s public cloud backup services and will look to other options. They will build private cloud-based infrastructures which will provide the levels of service and reliability required. VTL, deduplication and replication will be an important part of the resulting solution. Look for a future blog post on this topic.

One reply on “The Cloud, Company Size and Data Protection”

Thanks a lot for sharing this with all of us you rlaely know what you’re talking about! Bookmarked. Kindly also visit my website =). We could have a link exchange arrangement between us!

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