Over the past few years we’ve all been happly embracing the cloud for our computing, but there is one important thing to remember:
CLOUD is Computer Located Outside Ur Datacenter, this isn’t a bad thing because for most cloud providers their investment in redundancy, reliability and quality equipment is something most SMB’s could never hope to achieve. It does mean, a loss of control and recently Microsoft had a world wide outage of their cloud services exposed for many clients just how much we rely on these applications.
It’s sad to say, that outages like this are only likely to increase as more and more data gets consolidated within confined and vendor specific networks.
Am I suggesting you don’t use the cloud? Of course not, many vendors have extremely impressive track records with both security and reliability but it’s important to remember, those vendors are not liable in the event of data loss. If you have specific regulatory requirements for reporting breaches, or data loss the liability lies with the business owners. While the vendors may share some responsibility, the buck stops with you.
So this bring us back to a good piece of reliable advice, always have data exist in two locations, in the case of the cloud this typically means two separate and distinct cloud services or vendors. In the case of Microsoft 365 or Google’s GSuite we have backup programs for that. If you want to know more about them, we offer datto SaaS Protection for Microsoft 365 and GSuite.
In the case of Sage, Quickbooks or Salesforce there are backup solutions for them too.