By Nick Mehta, CEO,
LiveOffice
After a few high profile cloud outages – Amazon and
Microsoft – in the past few months, some may be wondering, will cloud adoption
slow down as a result? The short answer: probably not. But let’s back up a bit
and look at this white hot, newer trend of “the cloud.”
In the realm of today’s burgeoning technologies, there’s a
lot of talk about the cloud. There are huge proponents and plenty of skeptics,
but there is no denying it, there is a ton of interest in the cloud. Even the
heavy hitters are onboard, including Microsoft (BPOS and Office 365), Google
(Google Apps), Symantec (Enterprise Vault.cloud) and Salesforce.com (CRM
and Chatter). Then there are all the startups, almost too many too count.
According to IT analyst and business strategy consultant
Enterprise Strategy Group, cloud computing adoption is widespread … more
than three-quarters (82 percent) of organizations have plans to leverage
cloud-based services to some extent over the next five years. In addition, a
Gartner forecast predicts that cloud computing services sales will surge to
more than $148 billion by 2014. Although we’ve seen a lot of trends in
technology come and go, the cloud has clear staying power. Sure, it will expand
and morph along the way, but I don’t see it going anywhere other than up in
adoption with increased usage as more and more services move to the cloud.
One of the biggest drivers of cloud adoption is reducing the
burden on IT resources. Cloud-based services save IT organizations the expense
and time of dealing with storage, servers, databases, backups, etc. The cloud
also allows companies to turn a capital expense into a more balance
sheet-friendly operating expense, scale more easily as they grow and reduce
their data center footprints.
But what does happen when the cloud service your
organization relies on goes down? The reality is you can’t totally forget about
risk in the cloud. With its many benefits, the cloud isn’t foolproof. Just like
the on-premise world, where you had to build lots of processes and procedures
to protect against security breaches, data loss and disasters, you need to have
similar policies and plans in place for your cloud-based services. As we’ve
seen, even the big guys aren’t immune to hiccups along the way.
For example, let’s look at cloud email. How will your
employees send and receive email if your service is down? How can you recover
data in the event of an employee error or service provider data loss? What are
you doing to retain, search and produce data for compliance or legal needs? Do
you know how you can get your data back if you want to switch service providers
or bring your email system back in house? These are all very important
questions not only to ask, but also to be able to answer when you are choosing
your cloud service providers.
What we’ve learned over the past few years as a provider of
hosted IT services is that archiving answers all of these questions. In fact,
we’ve built our business on this knowledge. First, depending on the type of
archiving solution you choose, your users can continue to send and receive
email when your mail server is unavailable. Second, your valuable data is
protected and readily available in an offsite archive (ideally with redundancy
in multiple data centers), so no matter what kind of data loss or breach you
experience, you can get it back. Next, the right kind of archive ensures that
you are prepared for compliance needs and e-discovery requests. Finally, if you
have an archive, you don’t have to worry about having data returned if you want
to move your cloud email to a new service provider or back in house – it’s all
there at your fingertips.
Cloud archiving is also a good way for organizations to test
the cloud overall and take a step toward other cloud-based services, like
email. Not only does it give companies time to get comfortable with the
technology, it also offers convenience, cost savings and other efficiencies
that win out over the fear of downtime.
Ultimately the cloud offers a number of benefits to help you
streamline processes and get a better view of your business. You just need to
understand how to protect your assets in the cloud. The recent Amazon and
Microsoft outages underline the importance of backing up valuable data in the
cloud, but these isolated incidents by no means suggest that anyone should run
from the cloud. I’m not sure you can anyway. However, you should do your due
diligence and understand what you are buying into, so you are prepared for all
possible scenarios.
Nick Mehta is CEO,
LiveOffice, a major provider of cloud-based email archiving, email compliance,
email discovery and email continuity solutions, with more than 18,000 clients
and a 97-percent client retention rate.
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