Critical Cloud Backup Questions Answered

There's no quicker route to an IT pink slip than losing your company's data. That's why backup and disaster recovery decisions are so important. Make a mistake and you may find yourself flipping burgers next to your kid's high school classmates.

Cloud backup and disaster recovery providers are facing a huge trust gap. If you have trouble trusting devices you can see or those trucks that cart away your optical disks and hide them in caves, how on earth can you place your job future in the hands of something as amorphous as the cloud?

IT is not known for taking leaps of faith. IT needs to know the cloud is safe. Imation Scalable Storage director Brian Findlay knows these concerns first hands -- he hears them every day from customers and prospects.

While an advocate of online, or cloud backup, Findlay does caution IT to bring this in cautiously, and only as a piece of an overall backup strategy. Maybe he is thinking about those pink slips too.

IT should look at the vendors very closely and measure the offering for safety and security.

In the early days of online storage (which wasn't that long ago) the cost and speed of moving data across the WAN was daunting. Through deduplication, fewer bits traverse these wires, making the economics more attractive. Making it more compelling, storage prices continue to fall, a nice little double whammy. Oh, and bandwidth costs are dropping too.

Posted by Doug Barney on 06/21/2012 at 12:47 PM