How A Virus Made Me Rethink Cloud Security
By The Business Solutions Network
Early this morning as I was about to send an email to a colleague, my email shut down and multiple popup messages flashed on my screen telling me my hard drive was unresponsive. Additional messages popped up from my Sophos antivirus software telling me that a virus had been detected and quarantined. That reassurance was quickly dashed as all my icons disappeared from my desktop, and the problem went from bad to worse.
Our IT person (the only IT person at our office) spent hours trying to fix my machine without wiping out all the data on my hard drive that I was “too busy” to copy to our network. Eventually, he had to wipe my machine and I lost a lot of data. As I’m thinking about this experience, I wonder how things might have been different if all my machine had been set up to back up my data to the cloud automatically? How much more quickly could my computer have been wiped clean and restored? How many other fires could our IT guy have been freed up to focus on?
The other day I came across an article from Brent Rhymes, president of iWave Software, which is a data center orchestration, automation, and cloud management software vendor. In his article, Rhymes talks about Private Storage Clouds – The Killer Cloud App For 2012. One of the five reasons he cites for the growth of this technology this year is the shortage of storage administrators. “As storage continues to grow at a rate of 62% per year and as IT staffing levels (even for storage administrators) remain at a flat or slow growth curve, IT organizations will have to turn to automation to increase storage administrator productivity to meet the growing demand for enterprise storage,” he says.
It sounds like a private storage solution could be the answer in some situations, but is that always necessary? I'm thinking there are probably several situations where a public cloud storage solution may be just as effective at securing (and restoring) your customers’ data -- for less.