5 Things You Didn’t Know About the Cloud
– Chandar Venkataraman, Chief Product Officer, Druva, says:
Cloud storage has been a huge boon for businesses in recent years to help keep data private and secure, but there are still a lot of things that people don’t know about the cloud.
1. Though its services are virtual, the cloud is tied to a physical location and is still vulnerable to outages
Even though the dependability of cloud data storage has increased significantly over time, the cloud still exists at ground-level, and is susceptible to power outages, sabotage and natural disasters. I can’t stress enough how important it is to select a provider with geographically redundant data centers to maintain service availability. Selecting the wrong cloud provider — one that doesn’t offer redundancy — could mean permanent loss of critical corporate data in the event that a server goes down.
2. Encryption is not always a guarantee of security and privacy of business data
Think about it. If your service provider has access to your encryption keys, can you really say that your data is secure? Some providers try to prevent a security breach by escrowing the key or by storing it separately from data and rotating it frequently. But in the event of a subpoena, the provider can still provide access your data.
The only real way to guarantee security is to utilize two-factor encryption key management, where the service provider has zero access to encryption keys. With two-factor management, the encryption key is further encrypted using the customer’s admin credentials, and only a token is stored in the cloud. Even if served with a subpoena, the provider has no way of granting access to your data.
3. Deduplication dramatically improves cloud backup and restore times
Did you know that on average, as much as 80 percent of data is duplicated across an enterprise? This happens because users often save multiple copies of an identical file locally, store the same file on multiple devices or send the same email attachment to different users. Having so much redundant data means that more data has to be transmitted over the network and causes storage requirements to skyrocket.
It’s important to look for a backup solution that utilizes global deduplication to identify and remove inessential data. Additionally, a good backup service should use multi-threaded restores to allow parallel transfers of multiple files and optimize WAN for the best use of available bandwidth.
4. Outdated storage technology without federated search can severely restrict IT control
Some cloud backup providers that continue to use old principles of storage technology don’t leverage federated search, which allows customers to quickly locate information on the network. This means that IT is unable to look across files and devices in the enterprise, and it becomes a challenge to track down and gather data for things like legal hold or e-discovery, or to enforce a policy. Modern backup solutions, on the other hand, empower IT with audit trails for visibility into data and make it easy to support governance and compliance needs.
5. Localized cloud backup providers put businesses at risk of violating local data residency laws
Today’s global businesses need tools to store data efficiently and easily. But these companies can run into trouble if their employees from around the world are backing up to a local data center in another country and risk violating local data residency laws. This isn’t something you should have to worry about.
Leading cloud backup providers are prepared to handle the global workforce of today by providing multiple redundant data centers around the world so that customers can control where their data is stored and make sure they are complying to local laws.
