Cheap is never good and good is never cheap
So the saying goes…. but why am I saying it?
Your customer’s data is critical to them for a number of reasons.
Not only do your customers need to restore their LOB database or other documents as part of their day-to-day business, but they might also need to recover an email or version of a file for tax purposes or legal reasons.
This is when ‘the chips are down’, ‘lives are on the line’ and any other clichés I might want to throw at you.
Seriously though, if your customer needs to get back an email from 9 years ago, can your system do it?
An online backup service must be able to store data going back many years if you need to restore it from that period. The only way to do this is to have a platform that isn’t tied to the underlying hardware, i.e. a cloud system. The phrase ‘cloud’ is well worn nowadays, but generally speaking, should allow an application to consume and release data as and when required and should never have one single-point-of-failure.
Let’s look at tradition file systems in use before the cloud explosion a few years back and how online backup providers still use them.
It is quite easy to purchase mass storage at less than 0.5p per GB. These calculations are based on a NAS device with RAID 5, large consumer disks (not enterprise disks) and a fast broadband line or a leased line in a data centre.
Systems like this will fail sometime and do not lend themselves to data migration onto a new device whilst still allowing access to the data for applications.
Either way, you will have a long period when you can’t access your data.
Do you require something extra from your online backup provider? i.e. a cloud that has no single-point-of-failure and can heal itself any time? Of course the connectivity between your customers’ servers and where they backup to needs to be fully redundant without any shared connections or providers.
This is why we now store all data on Microsoft’s cloud in the UK for UK customers. Customers outside of the UK can use an Azure region close to them.
Because we now run all of our new services from Microsoft’s cloud in the UK, we never have to worry about the loss of data and neither should you.
Even though we use Microsoft’s cloud to store your data, we still run promos with 100GB of free storage.
A bit about the Azure service:
Locally redundant storage (LRS) provides at least 99.999999999% (Eleven 9s) durability of objects within a 12 month period by replicating your data within a storage scale unit.
A write request returns successfully only when it has been safely written to all replicas. These replicas each reside in separate fault domains and upgrade domains within one storage scale unit.3
Your data will stay in the UK or your specified Azure region and won’t be moved to another region. If your DR plan is more complex, we can replicate your data to any Microsoft Azure region, and they have more than 60 worldwide at the time of writing this.
Andreas Martinez.