Cloud is a hot buzz word now-a-days. A lot of people are moving to the cloud for many reasons. From rapid elasticity of their environment, broad network access of their applications, less in house to manage, test/dev, etc. The biggest problem with putting all your data in the cloud is security and reliability.
I recently read an article that was a perfect example of this. It seems a company “Code Spaces” had some hackers break into their Amazon Cloud. The hackers used a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack to black mail the company. It seems that the DDoS attach was not their only motive though. In the end, most of their data, backups, machine configurations and offsite backups were either partially or completely deleted. Code Spaces could not survive the attack and went out of business. The real finishing blow to the company was really the loss of their off-site backups.
This brings up scary (but realistic) truth that the “cloud” isn’t as bullet proof as we may want to believe. People don’t quite realize that putting their data in the cloud is truly putting the security of their company and clients data in the cloud. How secure do you really think Azure and AWS really are? If you read the fine print in the Terms-of-Use (and no one really does) you may not feel as confident in your cloud vender as you do now. Think about it, you are putting the security and future of your company in the hands of a company who got its start selling books… This leads to an interesting concept. How to I protect my data in the cloud for business continuity?
Well a new company has emerged that addresses this growing concern, All9s. All9s gives companies the ability to backup and recover cloud-hosted data. Imagine having ur production environment in AWS and your DR environment in Azure or Rackspace. You simply point to the files in your primary cloud environment and schedule when and how often you want our solution to back them up. As the data changes in your primary environment, their solution automatically recognizes the changes and updates your backup environment.
They are able to remove the biggest caveat of going to the cloud, risk. This is some face meltingly cool stuff. I would highly recommend checking out their free trial on their website. It truly is a brilliant concept. I am surprised no one has thought of this sooner.