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Street Smarts: Understanding the Differences in Cloud Applications

Posted on January 25, 2012 by Trevor Jones

Over the past week I’ve been involved in several discussions about Hosted Exchange, hosted fileshare, and hosted backup applications. In each conversation, it was clear that there are marked differences between offerings that might not be apparent the average business owner and this understanding is critical to making a good purchase decision. Making an assumption that all such products are created equal and deciding on price alone is likely to get you burned.

Backup and Restoration Practices and Policies

Online Backup Reduces Your Cost on IT Infrastructure

Internet backup services let your business avoid investment in costly IT infrastructure.

For starters, it’s important to understand how frequently data is backed up and what the process (and charges) are for restoring your data. For example: while some Hosted Exchange services are backed up every 15 minutes and allow the restoration of a single email or calendar item at no charge, other services charge extra for this service, and if you’re not paying the extra fee, your data might not be backed up at all. If you’re hoping to be able to recover that email that you accidentally deleted 5 minutes ago – not all services enable that.

Location, Location, Location

Another important consideration is where your data is physically stored – are there multiple layers of protection? In most cases, you want your data stored in multiple locations, so if a major catastrophe strikes, you can still get at the information. There are times, however, when legal considerations prevent you from storing data abroad, or when geo-diversity causes problems in the legal discovery process. Make sure you know where your data is, and how many copies exist.

How Secure is Your Data, Really?

A third consideration is how the security of your data is protected. In most cases data is encrypted, but as this post highlights, encrypt ion is only effective if the list of people with the decryption keys is limited. If your Cloud computing partner can decrypt messages for you when you forget your key, your data isn’t safe. Choose a provider who uses 256 bit or better encryption and a decryption key that only you have.

How do will you connect to your applications?

In most cases, you’ll use the public Internet to connect to your Cloud computing applications. However, many carrier based Cloud computing platforms offer you the option to connect with a private, managed network. This may cost slightly more, but could offer significant benefits to your business in terms of improved network performance and data security.

“Who’re you gonna call?”

Lastly, I’d be remiss if I didn’t advise you to consider who is answering your support calls. We’ve all called for support from someone from another country that doesn’t speak English well. We’ve also called for support from someone who knew nothing beyond what was on their script. Choose a provider with real, knowledgeable, local support resources you can count on.