Backups Are Still Necessary – Even When Using Cloud Services

By John Almeter

Do you keep some or all of your data on the cloud?  If so, you are in the majority instead of minority these days. The trend in the last few years has users moving away from storing critical files and data onsite and leveraging cloud services, like Desktops2Go®, where they’re more secure and accessible from anywhere and any device. The problem is that people have a false sense of security about the cloud and use cloud storage as a replacement for their backups.

If you’re one of the millions of people doing exactly that, you need to rethink your backup strategy. Here is an example of why: Andy Hunt, an author and programmer, tweeted about an Amazon outage that cost him the files he had stored on the cloud when the company experienced an outage.  His tweet reads as follows:

“Amazon AWS had a power failure, their backup generators failed, which killed their EBS servers, which took all of our data with it.  Then it took them four days to figure this out and tell us about it. Reminder:  The cloud is just a computer in Reston with a bad power supply.”

Many cloud-based companies spotlight their 99% up time and the low failure rates as big selling points for their services.  While true and accurate, what Andy said is also true.  At the end of the day, what we call ‘The Cloud’ is just a series of computers located somewhere else. Unfortunately, those computers, like the ones you have onsite, are prone to catastrophic hardware failures.

That’s why it’s important that even if you’re using the cloud extensively for your most important files, you need to make sure that your provider is performing some type of offsite backup of your data. This is critical so that in the event that there is an outage or catastrophic failure on their platform, you still have a way to access your data and keep working. With Desktops2Go®, as a standard part of our service, your data is backed up, offsite to another geographic location. Not every cloud provider offers this as a standard service or if they do provide offsite backup, it is for an extra fee. Don’t wait until something catastrophic happens. Confirm you have an offsite backup today so you won’t be sorry tomorrow.

If you would like to learn more about Desktops2Go®, contact us today!