The disruption of Amazon cloud services last month has allowed several popular sites to discuss the reliability of the cloud, and there is a general consensus that the cloud is still a good choice if you are prepared to fail. Like all good business plans, good cloud planning should prepare for failure, including Plan B and plan C, as well as a large number of backups.
Keep local backups faster for security
Most of the comments on this service outage are focused on redundancy, multiple data centers, and failure plans. It may not be necessary to deploy (or even buy) multiple data centers when your business is small, but you will need to have a way of coping with failure and a local redundant backup beyond cloud storage, so that you still have data available when the cloud is down.
Cloud backup services are very good. It can provide convenient and inexpensive offsite storage for your data. But what if you don't have a network or a slow speed when you need data access? So be sure to select a cloud service that has a desktop application that synchronizes files between the local and the cloud. This is critical for locally stored replicas. You need to review and investigate all of your favorite online storage services and see which ones have good desktop clients. These tools allow you to work with local files, synchronize backups to the cloud, and can also download files.
Backup methods for small and medium sized enterprises
Google Docs used Googlegears to provide this functionality. But now, Google is already using the Googlecloudconnect plug-in to provide Microsoft Office with a way to sync to Google servers.
Busydocs provides an easy way to save and edit local files for users ' Google documents, and to synchronize updates back into the cloud. However, it applies only to Windows.
Syncplicty is a more powerful tool that can be run on Mac and Windows systems and can be synchronized with file servers and Google Docs. The tool also has iphone and Android smartphone apps. Syncplicity also has a multi-user collaboration environment. This tool stores the data set on their servers while preserving local replicas.
Of course, although you have backed up your files to the cloud, you still need to keep your local redundancy. Cloud Backup is a great innovation to ensure file security, but keeping local backups allows users to access data more quickly.
For simple file backups, you need an external drive and some good backup software. When you need more disk space and trust local storage more, consider deploying a raid, or disk array system.
The cloud provides users with many advantages, such as synchronizing data between multiple machines and platforms, multi-user collaboration, and easy to use offsite backups. However, we still have to keep reminding you: redundancy, redundancy, redundancy.
Even in the worst case scenario, users can still easily retrieve data from the local system.