As summer warms up and the grasses dry out, it’s time to reflect on our disaster readiness and ask ourselves – is our data safe?
In the Victorian Black Saturday fires of 2009, 173 people sadly lost their lives, 414 people were injured, and a large number of homes and businesses were destroyed.
These fires destroyed countless computers and backup tapes. People lost both personal and business records, and in some cases organisations were unable to recover records of debtors – resulting in them struggling to get paid. This year, with the fire season now upon us, it’s time to consider how technology has advanced to help us protect our assets – everything from family photos to business accounting systems.
In nature, it’s the water that falls from clouds that puts out fires, but in the case of technology, the benefits come from storing our data in the clouds.
Many of us still doubt the validity and safety of cloud solutions, wondering where our data is stored, and if it’s secure. Certainly governments have big decisions to make about the sovereignty of data, with some big questions to be answered. Who owns it? Can sensitive, national data be stored off-shore? Will it be data mined to create new forms of intelligence about people, companies, technology secrets and so forth?
However, my focus is on the individual, and the SMEs who struggle to deploy and manage systems that suitably protect their data. Often people believe they have a reasonable level of protection up to the point that their data is gone because, really, they had insufficient protection all along. While we can create systems that copy our local data to the cloud, for both PCs and servers, this is an extra step that adds cost and complexity – often slowing down systems when we most need them to perform. I know the systems that start backing up my home PC just drive me to distraction.
So the next step is to move our data to the clouds and use cloud applications to access the data. Technology has advanced to ensure we can access that data from just about anywhere via wireless networks. Telstra’s new 4G network, which fails back to the 3G network should the 4G signal be unavailable, is one of the fastest wireless networks in the world, and offers excellent coverage to most parts of Australia. This allows us to access our applications in the cloud from anywhere in the country. Many public areas from cafes to airports offer free, wireless networks, so we can access our cloud systems while travelling as well.
We can now use tools such as Office 365 from Microsoft to store our personal or company email in the cloud – giving us the benefits of shared calendars, central management with archiving and backup, and all provided at very reasonable rates. Given that it includes spam filtering, which many of us already pay a monthly fee for, the additional cost is easily justified by the reduction in infrastructure and maintenance costs. Imagine no more shuffling of backup tapes or hard drives, and knowing that a large company like Microsoft has your back. Love them or hate them, they can afford to invest in systems and infrastructure most companies (including publicly-listed businesses) can only dream about.
As for security, large companies such as Microsoft have a team of people dynamically monitoring their digital perimeter to ensure hackers are stopped at the gate. Of course, even 24-hour-a-day monitoring and constant security action is not enough to be 100% secure – but it’s a lot better than the effort most SMEs go to for managing, patching, and monitoring their firewalls. So as long as we stick to major brands of providers, we are probably safer in the clouds.
On the accounting front, we are seeing each of the software companies come to market with a cloud version of their tools – MYOB and Quicken already have products out there. Xero has come from nowhere to be a key player in the cloud-based application space and they seem to have a competitive product that can offer innovative solutions and improved reporting functions. Microsoft Dynamics has its online offering, and SAP (along with many others) are not far behind.
Photos can be stored in online albums from Facebook to SharePoint online. For each land-based data technology, we are seeing a cloud version appearing. We have SkyDrive and DropBox competing for mindshare by offering free or cheap online file storage.
For applications that are not available via software as a service solutions such as the ones mentioned above there are private cloud solutions whereby we can make use of part of a large system run by a hosting company such as Telstra with their Infrastructure as a Service product offering (IaaS). This platform will allow us to move proprietary server based software to their data center system and cease worrying about managing the infrastructure layer. This service is making it possible to run a business without servers.
This emerging technology is now changing the face of IT support, which is no longer about selling and supporting servers, but about assisting people to connect with their information systems and integrate the solutions they need to run their business. Finding advisers who understand this new technology area, and don’t want to sell you the latest server, is a challenge but is the new age of IT support.
So as summer approaches, think about the security of your data, and how safe it really is. How will you get to it after your computer and local storage systems – including backups – have been destroyed?
The more you have in the cloud, the less you have to worry about – and the more you can enjoy your holidays.
David Markus is the founder of Combo – the IT services company that ensures IT is never an impediment to growth. We win awards for the service we offer, so if your IT environment is slowing you down, contact Combo on 1300 726 626 to organise a complimentary consultation with David.
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