Businessman drawing a Cloud Computing 800x500 72 ppi - Is Your Cloud Provider Right for Your Business?

Is your Cloud provider ready for your data disaster?

In today’s business world, data is everything.  Your business relies on data to function and losing data can literally put you out of business.

The two leading causes of data loss are hardware and software failure.  And in the U.S. over 140,000 hard drives fail each week.  If that’s not enough to keep you up at night, then consider that the #1 emerging threat to business data loss are malicious attacks.  90% of IT service providers reported a recent ransomware attack on a small business.

If you manage to avoid the hardware failures or malicious attacks, there is always the human error factor.  No matter the cause, it is important to make sure your business is protected in the event of a data loss.

Most businesses today rely on a combination of onsite and cloud backup to ensure redundancy and provide the highest level of insurance for their business.  But how do you know what cloud service to use?  Should you use a known backup cloud service like Datto, Veeam, Arcserve, Google, Microsoft Azure or Amazon.  What about a local data center?  Either way you are still using a cloud service.  Essentially, any service that operates over the internet and provides resources through tools or applications is a cloud.  Whether local, national or international.

So, how do you know if the cloud service you are using is right for your business? Any cloud provider should have the following, to keep you protected:

  • Redundant Data Centers for Disaster Protection
  • Redundant Internet Provider with failover
  • Redundant External and Internal power sources for power outages
  • Redundant Internal Networking Equipment
  • Redundant Cooling Equipment
  • Expected Downtime of < 20 minutes per year

If your cloud service provider doesn’t meet all these criteria, your business may be at risk.  It’s important to know the facts to you can keep your business protected.

How do you know your cloud provider is right for your business?

  • Look for redundancy across all aspects of the data center to ensure minimal to no downtime
    • Data Centers (at least 2 geographically separated in the event of a disaster)
    • Power (backup generator)
    • Internet Provider (redundant providers in the event one provider has an outage)
    • Network Equipment (redundant switches, routers, firewalls and servers to ensure uptime in the event of hardware failure)
    • Cooling Equipment (Data centers get hot and heat can bring down a center.  Redundant cooling can prevent a failure)
  • Ask if your backup, either onsite or in the cloud can be used as a virtual server to keep you operational in the event of a server failure
  • Look for stability of the organization, size does matter when it comes to your business
  • Ask your cloud provider if their technologies are in line with today's top of the line technologies.  And when they were last updated