In recent months, cloud services have grown in size and in the range of their capabilities, making fast, efficient data storage a cost-effective proposition for even the smallest organization. The cloud has become the most efficient avenue for enabling backup recovery and disaster recovery plans. But some businesses are asking: what should we send there? Do we need to replicate all our files and databases?
Here are four types of data businesses typically send to the cloud.
Backups of Only Core Business Data
The cloud is a very efficient way to protect your data for backup or disaster recovery purposes. What you need to do is to determine which data, apps, systems or IT services are the most critical for the continued operations of your business. Is it your sales data, your customer contact lists, or your production information?
Once you have examined the things that are the most essential to your business, you need to prioritize your data into tiers, on the basis of what is most important, second most important, and so on. The highest tiers represent those business functions with the most aggressive recovery point objective (RPO), and the fastest recovery time objectives (RTO).
The highest tiers should get the highest priority in your cloud storage systems. If you are limited by costs, for example, then only send your highest priority data.
A DR Copy of Everything
If you have important files that reside on one system only, those files are at risk. Even if you are storing several copies of those files, being located on a single physical device makes those files vulnerable. All documents, files, images and other forms of rich data on every hard drive in your business could be sent “off-site” to the cloud, if they have any value at all.
Information that Needs to be Shared Across Geographic Locations
The cloud has made collaborating over distance a simpler thing. It has nurtured the virtual office – available anytime, from anywhere. Working with others usually means sharing files, but sharing files from inside out through local networks can be a very complicated process. But simple, consumer-oriented cloud services like Dropbox have led the way to simplify the process considerably, permitting rapid sharing of data to diverse participants, and syncing data continuously.
Archives
Archival material is usually dated and potentially infrequently-used historical data. As this kind of data piles up, it becomes more and more difficult to cost-justify maintaining it in expensive, high-performance onsite storage. It is usually low-priority data, but the kind of data that may have some significance down the road for the purposes of complying with tax inquiries, record-keeping regulations, or for checking an old customer transaction from years gone by.
Keeping certain data in the cloud may make it safer and more recoverable. Cloud storage represents nothing less than a revolution in the way we keep, protect and use our data.
