Posted by Jeff Cato on Wed, May 09, 2012
Today is our last blog centered around All Shore Global Resources' recent experience of moving all of their IT related business from internal to the Cloud. If your business is at the crossroad of deciding whether to upgrade and invest in its internal infrastructure vs pursuing Cloud IaaS, then this six part blog/video series is for you. Listen to the different items they considered in their decision making process on Cloud IaaS and why they decided what they did for their company. It should give you some good practical insight into things to consider for your own company.
In this last brief video, Bryan Rudd, COO of Allshore, describes the importance of customer support when thinking through their decision. When the idea of customer support comes to mind, one tends to think of availability, response time and level of expertise. Bryan shares his personal thoughts with us on this topic.
I hope you enjoyed this entire six-part video series on one company's personal journey to the cloud. You should now be better equipped on how to approach this topic for your own business. If you want to learn more, then register for our webinar on "Changing the Way You Do Business With Cloud IaaS".
Posted by Jeff Cato on Tue, May 01, 2012
We are nearing the end of talking about All Shore Global Resources' recent experience of moving all of their IT related business from internal to the Cloud. Allshore was at a point in their growing business where they had to make a decision to either upgrade everything internally to meet their expansion needs, or embrace Cloud IaaS and allow it to be the strategic choice to help them grow to the next level. In doing so, the topic of backup was very critical to them.
Bryan Rudd, COO of Allshore, describes the importance of offsite backup when thinking about the desired redundancies in their data backup strategy, data recovery options and recovery time objectives. This move to the Cloud now allows his business to restore data via snapshots or even file level. When you deal with issues like downtime, backups and the possibility of losing data, Bryan will tell you that life is a lot better now that he is in the Cloud.
I hope you enjoyed Part Five this week as we discussed the importance of data backup, and will stick around for our last session with Bryan discussing Allshore's journey to the Cloud. If you want to learn more about Cloud IaaS in the meantime, register for one of our webinars or download one of our whitepapers. If you want to know more specifically how CoreVault can make your journey to the Cloud a successful experience, then please reach out to one of our cloud experts today.
Posted by Jeff Cato on Thu, Apr 19, 2012
Unfortunately this past week the Midwest was hit very hard by approximately 60-70 tornadoes resulting in a ton of tragedy and heartache for so many people and businesses. In our home state of Oklahoma, the town of Woodward was hit the hardest. It takes a long time for a place to rebound from such devastation as many people and businesses have to rebuild their lives from the ground up.
One part of that rebuilding process is with a business' data and overall information. One reminder of this for me happened as early as Monday this week, when we received a call from a Woodward, OK attorney telling us that his colleague lost his nearby law firm, while he was fortunate enough to have not been affected by the storm. He was also calling to get his data backed up with us because the devastation was too close to home. He saw what happened to his colleague and realized he needed to stop procrastinating and get his data backed up off-site. There was no more delaying this topic for him. He mentioned he had been thinking about getting off-site backup for his firm for a year or two, but just never got around to it. Well, not anymore.
The crazy thing is I know many businesses still think the same way about the protection of their data. They know they need to get it stored off-site in a manner that allows them to restore it quickly should they ever lose all or part of their data. However, they just never make it a point to get it done. Are you one of those people? I hope you are not after reading this blog.
Businesses can learn from others' experiences and situations like the one described above, so they never find themselves in that predicament. Your business has to place itself in a position so you can be back up and running no matter how severe the situation. The technology, simplicity and cost efficiency exists too much today to not establish an automated, secure and off-site storage strategy for your data. What if I told you that 93% of all companies that lost their data for 10 days or more filed for bankruptcy in less than a year? Does that help turn up the heat anymore?
The reality is we are just in the beginning stages of tornado season. There is a good chance there will be more stories like the one described above. The question is, are you going to do something about it? You owe it to yourself, your business, reputation and employees to take action today. Here is a short video from Jim Calloway, Law Practice Management with the Oklahoma Bar Association, discussing the importance of backup for attorneys. I hope you decide to take action and get your data securely protected off-site today.
Posted by Jeff Cato on Tue, Apr 17, 2012
We are more than halfway in talking about this company's recent experience moving all of their IT related business from internal to the Cloud. Allshore Global Resources was at a point in their growing business where they had to make a decision to either upgrade everything internally to meet their expansion needs, or embrace Cloud IaaS and allow it to be the strategic choice to help them grow to the next level. One of the criteria they were very sensitive to in the decision making process was scalability.
Bryan Rudd, COO of Allshore, describes how easy it is to scale his business today versus how it would have been if he was in his old physical server environment. This move to the Cloud has allowed his business to be better off today both internally and externally as a business. He is able to be a lot more responsive to his business needs as things can shift a lot day to day. When you deal with issues like downtime, backups and the possibility of losing data, Bryan will tell you that life is a lot better now that he is in the Cloud
I hope you enjoyed Part Four this week as we discussed scalability, and will stick around the next two weeks to hear the last two parts of Allshore Global Resources' journey to the Cloud. If you want to learn more about Cloud IaaS in the meantime, register for one of our webinars or download one of our whitepapers. If you want to know more specifically how CoreVault can make your journey to the Cloud a successful experience, then please reach out to one of our cloud experts today.
Posted by Jeff Cato on Mon, Apr 09, 2012
We are early on in talking to you about this journey a company recently experienced moving all of their IT related business from internal to the Cloud. Allshore Global Resources was at a point in their growing business where they had to make a decision to either upgrade everything internally to meet their expansion needs, or embrace Cloud IaaS and allow it to be the strategic choice to help them grow to the next level.
Like with many companies, you put together a list of criteria to help guide you down the decision making path. Some of those may be cost, hardware or backups, to name a few, that are critical to a company. In video #2, Bryan Rudd, COO of AllShores, shares the criteria list they put together that was important to them in this process. It should either confirm some things for you or maybe bring up a new item or two you didn't think of beforehand.
I have also included a second video in this blog today that pertains to implementation and benefits of Cloud IaaS. Usually a lot of companies considering moving their business to something new, like Cloud Iaas or Cloud Backup, want to know from other businesses that have already made the move and what the implementation was like for them. I am sure we all can share a story or two of a really bad implementation experience on something new you rolled out for your business. So I sat down with Bryan again in video #3 and had him discuss what implementation of Cloud IaaS was like for them. In the second part of this same interview, I also had Bryan address if the benefits he expected before the move to the Cloud actually became reality for them or not.
I hope you enjoyed Parts two and three this week, and will stick around in the next few weeks to hear the last three parts of the Allshore Global Resources journey. If you want to learn more about Cloud IaaS in the meantime, register for one of our webinars or download one of our whitepapers. If you want to know more specifically how CoreVault can make your journey to the Cloud a successful experience, then please reach out to one of our cloud experts today.
Posted by Jeff Cato on Thu, Mar 22, 2012
There are times when companies can tell stories, along with many other ways, to help educate businesses about how their products and services can help solve their problems. However, there are other times when someone tells your story for you that it is more effective than doing it yourself. It is always good to hear from other businesses when they have been down a journey that you are considering for yourself. Why not learn from others and their experiences so yours can be that much better. Haven't we always been told by our parents "Learn from others experiences, successes and failures"? I know I was told this growing up and I tell the same to my own children.
Many companies are hearing about the Cloud and have a lot of concerns, interests and questions on what is hype and what is reality. They want to know if it can really help their business and how. Is it hard to transition to the cloud, whether in part or full? What questions do I ask or things do I look for to make it a good experience? In order to help you with this thought process, I interviewed a company recently that went through the consideration, process and implementation of moving their business to Cloud IaaS. Here is your chance to hear from someone else's journey to the Cloud.
I have sliced my interview with this company, Allshore Global Resources, into 6 small parts to help you hear how they approached this important consideration and ultimate decision to move everything to the Cloud. Bryan Rudd, COO of Allshore, describes in Part 1 their company before their move to Cloud IaaS.
I hope you enjoyed Part 1 and will stick around in the coming few weeks to hear the other parts to their journey. If you want to learn more about Cloud IaaS, register for one of our webinars or download one of our whitepapers. If you want to know more specifically how CoreVault can make your journey to the Cloud a successful experience, then reach out to one of our cloud experts today.
Posted by Jeff Cato on Wed, Mar 14, 2012
There continues to be a lot of discussion centered around cloud computing these days, and why not. IDC predicts spending on Public Cloud will be approximately $73 billion by 2015. CRN also predicts that small business spending on cloud computing will reach nearly $100 billion. That makes for a large market and a lot of growth opportunity for cloud service companies. Two pieces of cloud computing worth talking about today are Cloud Backup and IaaS. The two really go hand in hand as businesses consider their overall data protection strategy.
There are typically two different backup options commonly available with server virtualization that businesses need to be aware of: Snapshot and File Level. They definitely have their differences on how they can help with your data protection. In the video below, Raymond Castor, CIO, and Jeff Cato, V.P. of Marketing, discuss these two data backup methods and what you need to know about them.
Hopefully you are more informed about your current data backup options even though you are embracing virtualization. If you want to learn more about Cloud IaaS and/or Backup, then consider registering for our Backup webinar or IaaS webinar today.
Posted by Jeff Cato on Tue, Feb 28, 2012
I had the pleasure of being invited to speak on a panel discussion on Cloud Computing at the Louisiana State Bar Conference this past week. The title of the session was "What's Cloud Computing? Is it for me? Is it safe?" I was joined by the IT Director for the State Bar, along with a couple of attorneys that provided some diverse points of view on the topic. What was interesting starting off the session, was the solicitation of a couple of the panel speakers giving their definition of cloud computing. I am always curious to hear the varying views and definitions of it, which sometimes leads to more confusion than there needs to be for the end user. However, I do think that is part of why you have these types of panel approaches to topics. There was definitely one panelist that was funny with some of his comments. He was also the most negative one of the group about the topic. The other three of us were more positive, while expressing caution for areas that a business needs to ask important questions about before diving in. It got me to wondering. Are you more positive or negative on cloud computing? Why do you have that point of view? I would love to hear your comments.
We then ventured into the topic of whether cloud computing was safe and secure. I always try to remind people what we are comparing it to. If your business doesn't encrypt nor store its data off-site, then there isn't much comparison. There is no doubt cloud computing, specifically cloud backup and recovery, is a much more secure approach than your current setup. Most businesses do not encrypt their backups and a small, growing number are starting to make plans for getting their data off-site. Even being in Louisiana and talking to quite a few people at the event, there were a larger percentage not doing either one than you would imagine. Despite experiencing Katrina back in 2005, many still have not learned from it.
We discussed other important topics on how the cloud provides a variety of ways your business can restore its data, depending on the data size and recovery time objective (RTO) to name a few. Different levels of data recovery such as local, online, overnight and virtual were brought up to the group. We also talked about how you know who to trust with your data. Over the past three to four years, we have seen some of America's largest companies collapse or nearly collapse overnight. Companies you would have never imagined that happening to, especially so quickly. Is no one exempt from going out of business? What about asking a provider for third party certifications or even third parties like your professional association?
Do you think all this cloud stuff is hype or reality? Is there more upside than downside? We have to keep in mind that Cloud Computing is a broad topic with many different flavors available to help your business be more secure, protected and agile moving into 2012 and beyond. It is definitely here to stay and is just a matter of what cloud service makes the most sense to your business and its needs. If you are interested in cloud IaaS or backup/recovery, contact one of our cloud experts at cloudexpert@corevault.com. Also, watch one of our video series on 5 Tools for Your Virtualization Tool Box to help you with considering cloud IaaS.
Posted by Jeff Cato on Fri, Feb 17, 2012
You just have to laugh some days when you see so many people walking around with their heads down so focused on their smartphones. You would think they were on a date and the person was enthralled with listening and reading every word the phone was giving them. Tablets are becoming the same kind of obsession. Don't get me wrong, I have these same tools, but the effect they have on people's lives and even attitudes is incredible. Now what if something happened to those all important tools and the data on them was lost and not able to be restored? Can you imagine the panic that would set in?
While we love the increased mobility in our lives and in the workforce, it creates difficulties for many companies to protect that mobile data in an automated and secure fashion. Many companies still struggle protecting the data on laptops effectively with their backup processes and systems. The FBI has a stat that says "a laptop is lost or stolen every 53 seconds". If you put it in weekly terms, that is more than 10,000 a week. Wow! You can count on the amount of stolen tablets and smartphones increasing on a weekly basis too. As users today generate increasing amounts of business content on their mobile devices, IT must respond and protect this data. They must safeguard that data no matter where it is. So what is your company doing or planning to do in order to address this growing issue?
There are companies out there that have solutions that enable your business to provide that seamless and secure end to end data protection throughout it. Your company needs a data protection strategy that provides higher scalability and new application access control policies. What about regulatory compliance? Are you meeting those demands with your mobile devices? It is also vital to have the ability to roll back to any point across any device to meet recovery point and recovery time objectives. You definitely want a local and off-site encrypted backup copy of those devices. Essentially you need complete visibility, control and management of the entire backup environment from anywhere/anytime. Make sure your solution also works well in both physical and virtual environments. More and more businesses are pursuing virtualization and cloud IaaS to take further advantage of the economic, security and scalability benefits that come along with them.
So what is your plan to protect your smartphones and tablets? Do you need some help formulating one that provides you a hybrid cloud solution that is secure, seamless and provides the end to end data protection necessary in today's mobile environment? Then contact one of our cloud experts and tell them your situation so they can help you with a solution.
Posted by Jeff Cato on Wed, Jan 18, 2012
One topic that never seems to get enough attention from businesses when talking about their data protection strategy is their data retention policies. Some of these are impacted by the way a company backs up its data and if it has regulatory compliance issues. For example, many companies that backup their data to tapes tend to throw everything on them with no rhyme or reason. This causes a lot of data to be backed up that isn't necessary and could even be cause for increased liability. It also impacts your backup window by backing up more unnecessary files daily. Cloud Backup has a great filtering option allowing you to designate files or types of files you do not want backed up off-site.
Another important element to this topic is the deletion of data. There can be scenarios where you want to delete data from your network, but always keep a backup copy for legal or compliance reasons. There are also situations where you want to both delete it from your network and your backup copies. The key is to automate and review those policies for your business on an ongoing basis.
Whenever using Cloud Backup to protect your data, it is easy to set up the retention policies for your data on the front end and make changes along the way in a matter of minutes. Like anything else in life, if you make sure to do things right on the front end, it makes everything easier on the back end. Watch the following brief video from Jeff Cato, V.P. of Marketing, and Edward Wallace, Sales Engineer, as they discuss some best practices for setting up your retention policies.
If you want to learn more about Cloud Backup, then download our latest whitepaper "The Top 7 Reasons Businesses are Shifting to Cloud Backup" today. If you would like to receive a customized solution and price for your business, then reach out to one of our cloud experts so they can help you today.