Being the “Cloud Guy” at Quantum, I get to talk to a wide variety of people about what’s happening in the cloud, from the wildly optimistic visionaries to the skeptics in the wondering, “Is my data really safe?” This week the visionaries got a hard reality check when Nirvanix abruptly announced plans to shut down their cloud service, giving customers and partners just two weeks to find another place for their petabytes of data.
The cloud still offers enormous benefits, but I think the Nirvanix example is a great reminder that not all clouds are created equal and there are key considerations companies need to thoroughly evaluate.
Keep Data On-Site
Data protection best practices, and our recommendation, is to keep a full copy of your data offsite, while at the same time retaining a full copy on premise. The Nirvanix shutdown underscores the importance of retaining a full copy of data on premise. Having an on premise copy provides fast restores that, when combined with an offsite copy, gives full protection for any situation.
Diversify
Even though the cloud offers many benefits, customers need to continue to keep diversity in their data protection portfolio, and use the right technology, at the right place, at the right time in the data’s life cycle. Whether it’s public or private cloud, keep a holistic view of technologies that encompasses deduplicated disk, tape and object storage. For some customers – particularly those with large, unstructured data sets – object storage can provide the benefits of public cloud in a private cloud implementation. For other customers, deduplication can be leveraged to optimize cloud and maximize bandwidth utilization, bringing the cost per TB of storage down dramatically.
Know Your Provider
When I get into conversations about cloud security, it’s about others accessing your data, not necessarily the security and stability of the data service provider. It is encouraging to me that according to a recent ESG report* most companies are choosing to go with storage specialists who have history and experience in data protection.
So do I think this will affect the 45%* of companies planning to move to a cloud data protection service ? No, but I do think the Nirvanix example will likely become an important part of the discussion, which is a good thing from my perspective.
If you need some more resources for you cloud research, we have some useful tools you can download:
- Key Considerations for Cloud Backup Slideshare – Watch Here
- Cloud Backup Pros, Cons and Considerations – Watch Here
- Q-Cloud Backup-as-a Service that offers on-site disk back up and replication to the cloud - Learn More
So what are your thoughts on the Nirvanix closure? Does it affect how you’re thinking about Cloud data protection services?
* ESG Research Report: Data Protection-as-a-service (DPaaS) Trends, September 2013
