Computerworld recently featured an article discussing how small businesses, by leverage the cloud and Software as a Service, are able to cut their IT costs. The following quote says it best:
Third party clouds, however, can now do everything a business needs. The smaller the company, the more they should look to hosted “cloud” providers for services ranging from marketing to customer acquisition to accounting to project management to payroll. You don’t have to use hosted services for all these things, but if you do, you’ll save considerable money upfront and get constant software upgrades as part of your deal.
Click here to read the article in full.
2 Comments
How does RocketMatter’s backup differ from the cloud-only data-loss currently being experienced in the MicroSoft/T-Mobile/Sidekick/Danger debacle? Users aren’t interested in the technical explanation of why their data is gone forever. What other backup options is RocketMatter providing other than, “trust us, your data is safe.” I’m not trying to be snarky here, but that’s what all SaaS adoption rates boil down to. And most consumers, especially lawyers, don’t trust anyone else with their data. After all, if it can happen to M$, it can certainly happen to [insert name of company].
I don’t know how I didn’t get to this comment earlier. It’s an absolutely crucial point. The T-Mobile Sidekick M$ debacle should rattle everyone’s shoes, if it hasn’t already. If you’re reading this and are only marginally aware of what happened, look up the incident.
Here’s how to protect yourself:
1) Ascertain the backup practices of the cloud provider. Ensure that they conduct georedundant backups daily. They should have a several different backup mechanisms in place.
2) Make sure you have a way to back up the data yourself in a form you can use and read. You should be able to retrieve your data at anytime on demand, and make sure to test it out and give it a whirl. Schedule times to do this, like once a day or once a week.
Until you, as a consumer, build confidence and trust in your provider, the only way to sleep at night is with your own local backups (which hopefully you then backup on top of that).
FYI, here’s a link to our Security and Data Safeguard document.