aimed at larger businesses. The
new service, Carbonite Pro, will
back up servers and network-attached storage.
Finding the right solution
There’s more to finding the right
cloud storage provider than just
looking for the lowest cost. What
matters more is that the cloud storage provider meets your needs. You
need to make sure it is able to work
with your company’s enterprise
environment, that it meets your
security requirements, and that it
is going to be in business in the
long term.
It’s important that any cloud-
based storage service you choose
is easy to use. These services are
designed to have little or no impact
on the IT staff. In fact, one of the
primary markets for cloud storage
is companies that have no IT staff.
To be useful, setup and operation
need to be as close to automatic
as possible.
Iron Mountain, for example,
delivers a preconfigured appliance to customers to manage the
storage. Other services provide a
client software package that performs automatic online backup. In
each of these examples, the data is
encrypted before it leaves the computer where it resides and rides a
secure, encrypted link to the storage facility.
Make sure the company you
go with stores data in functional,
enterprise-class data centers. This
will not only help ensure that your
data is safe, but will also serve as
a reliable means of disaster recovery.
You also need to ensure that
your storage provider meets all
of the regulations that apply to
your organization in regard to data
storage. This means, among other
things, that you need to ensure
a level of encryption appropriate
8 QUESTIONS TO ASK ABOUT CLOUD STORAGE
CONTINUED ON PAGE 16
Cloud-based storage providers such as
Carbonite keep track of where your data
is and make it available to you when you
need it.
