Cloud Provides Secure Back-up Facility

Anyone who has worked in an office for any length of time knows the ‘Blue Screen of Death’ that signals a laptop or PC giving up the ghost and potentially taking with it reams of vital data and hard work. By regularly backing up work to the cloud as well as the harddrive of a machine, important information and large volumes of work can be stored and managed securely.

The information below is a rough guide to using the cloud to back up work and mission-critical applications.

Mobile Working

Because cloud services can be accessed remotely and information uploaded to them securely, organisations can increasingly use solutions from firms such as Canopy – the open cloud company to provide flexible and accessible storage options for employees wherever they happen to be.

Indeed, a recent study by office provider Regus indicated that 42 per cent of the 4,000 business respondents polled now work outside the office for at least half of the typical working week. Cloud storage also offers the added advantage that backed up information can be retrieved from any device, so that it can be used by numerous workers and those on the move in the way that suits them best.

Scalable Storage

With many cloud services, capacity can be increased or decreased in line with peaks and troughs in demand, helping IT managers to make the best use of their budgets.

Scalable storage is especially useful for those businesses that are subject to seasonal changes or for companies that expect to see a spike in data connected with events, such as a new product launch, and need to back it up. In addition, scalable storage is also there when the unexpected occurs and there is an unforeseen rise in demand for capacity in an organisation. This responsiveness of the cloud to company data management and storage needs is one of its key features.

Secure Networks

Secure networks can be particularly effective when individuals are working remotely and uploading what they have done to the cloud. By using a service that encrypts connections linking to the web, work is protected from snoopers even when it is uploaded to the cloud using public Wi-Fi networks.

It is this safeguarding facility that means analyst Gartner recently predicted the value of the cloud-based security services sector will climb to $2.1 billion by the end of 2014 and to $3.1 billion by the end of next year, with encryption expected to be an especially strong area for growth.

Mission Critical Networks

The agility, flexibility and scalability of the cloud offers an ideal solution for companies migrating mission-critical applications, delivering a secure space for key IT infrastructure to be shared and stored. For applications that need to reach large numbers of workers or customers, then the cloud is the ideal place for them to be made accessible.

Cloud Offers Peace of Mind

Investing in the cloud can provide companies and their employees with peace of mind that all their hard work and important information is backed up in case individual pieces of technology or even in-house servers let them down. And with Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt recently predicting that a shift to the cloud “is inevitable”, the safety and security of cloud storage solutions will persuade many organisations to make the move.