How to Protect Your Data When Using Cloud Services

Jason Reid Blogs

Protect Your Data

As more and more businesses move critical applications and files to cloud services, how do you protect your data from unforeseen losses?

Organisations throughout the UK are adopting cloud services at an ever increasing rate. Where once there were concerns around support, functionality, and uptime, major providers such as Google and Microsoft have enhanced their cloud service offerings so that they fully meet the requirements of modern businesses.

Modern cloud services provide businesses with massive flexibility and scope for expansion. And with the sophisticated high availability platforms available through cloud service providers, the risk of suffering from a disaster recovery event is getting smaller all the time.

This all sounds great. And it is! Businesses have moved from dipping their toes in the cloud, hosting non-critical apps and test servers, to diving in feet-first and hosting critical services such as email and core applications. But if you’re hosting key systems in the cloud, remember that the data remains in your ownership. This means that it needs protecting against outages at the service provider level, potentially even to the extent that your cloud service provider ceases to exist.

How do you protect your data when using cloud services? In this blog post we’ll take a look at the issues that come with relying on your cloud service provider’s in-house backups, and how you can achieve appropriate levels of protection for your emails, applications, and data.

The Problem with Built-In Backup

Whether you host services with Microsoft Office 365, Google Apps, Amazon Web Services, or any one of the major cloud services providers out there, your data will be backed up using your provider’s built-in backup service.

This delivers a layer of protection to your applications and data. Should the service provider suffer an outage or a data loss event, they will have backups from which to restore. However, these backups are generally for the service provider and not necessarily readily available to you, the end user business.

Your business will have retention, frequency, and recovery requirements that may not be met by your cloud service provider’s backup offering. Put simply, if you are looking to carry out individual file restores for historic backups, your cloud service provider may not be able to deliver this.

Office 365 SharePoint recovery, for example, is carried out at the database level. Even if you only need to recover one document, you need to roll back the entire database, resulting in potentially significant data loss.

Protect Your Data with Effective Cloud Backups

For many businesses, the built-in backup services provided by cloud service providers are not sufficient to meet operational and regulatory requirements. Fortunately, there are cloud backup solutions available that enable you to protect your data to appropriate levels.

Cloud backup solutions such as AssureStor’s backup2cloud platform deliver: –

  • Service Level Agreements that meet operational requirements for recovery times. Recover files quickly, without having to wait hours or even days.
  • Data Retention that remains in-line with your regulatory and compliance needs. Whether your files need to be retained for 31 days or seven years, cloud backup solutions make this achievable.
  • Flexible Backup Frequency that meets your business’s granular recovery needs. If nightly backups aren’t sufficient for certain business-critical files and folders, multiple backup points can be implemented throughout the day.

By implementing an appropriate cloud backup solution, you can maintain control and ownership of your business data. AssureStor’s backup2cloud platform delivers advanced backups and data protection for Microsoft Office 365 and Azure, Google Apps, and Amazon Web Services. Contact us to learn more about how we can help you protect your data.