With 'The Cloud' becoming the standard way of implementing many kinds of computer driven solutions - from email and collaboration systems to databases, web servers and file sharing, it is important to remember that the term 'The Cloud' basically means 'someone else's infrastructure' - but it's still your data, and needs to be carefully maintained.

Onega can offer a range of business backup and continuity solutions to and for the cloud. We have a portfolio of products that we know and trust well to maintain client data safely and resiliently.

Most cloud providers will give you a very good SLA (service level agreement) and take measures to both back up their systems and provide for redundancy in them. For example Microsoft Office 365 maintains client email boxes on multiple servers and data stores at once, so that if one of their mail servers drops, you can still connect to your email and work as normal without even knowing that there is a fault. Traditionally in on-premise corporate systems that level of resilience would require investment in duplication or triplication of storage and processing, as well as running costs and licensing. With The Cloud you get all that for the mere monthly pounds that the service is billed at.

However, if you look at (and please do) the small-print, terms and conditions, and Service Level Agreements of the service providers; then you'll note they might have resilience and redundancy and make best efforts to keep your data safe, but they mainly guarantee the availability of their services - not your data. There may be a moral obligation here, but there is likely no legal one. There have been many real world cases where data loss happens because of technical or human problems.

If information is the lifeblood of your company's services, then it is very important to keep this safe and backed up. Common sense dictates some of the following guidelines:

  • Make sure you have backups of your cloud held data.
  • Ideally have multiple backups in different places for extra resilience.
  • Make sure backups are taken regularly.
  • Make sure that your backups work by monitoring and testing regularly.

Onega staff are very happy to run through your backup policies with you, and we have templates available for creating a useful document and policy if you don't already have one in place.

We have a number of solutions that we are happy to recommend where these fit your needs, and can thing outside the box where necessary also.

Some of our best practice portfolio solutions include:

SkyKick Office 365 Cloud Backup
Mimecast Email Continuity
Ahsay Backup
StorageCraft
Acronis Cloud Backup
Druva
Symantec Backup Exec

These can address both backup and continuity requirements in different ways.

If you'd like a health check on your backup systems, please don't hesitate to get in touch and discuss how we can help or ask for a free copy of our backup policy template documents.