Natural Disasters - The Effect on Your Data
Did you feel that? Well your data sure did.
Yesterday, at about 3:15 PM, Massachusetts, along with some other east coast states, felt the aftershock of a 5.9 magnitude earthquake that hit Virginia. The Sonian office here in Newton even felt the floor and a few chairs and desks shake. Granted, some Sonian employees were a little worried, especially since earthquakes aren’t a frequent occurrence in New England. However, one thing we didn’t have to worry about was our data and our customers’ data.
A natural disaster is never planned and always unexpected. At a moment’s notice your office, your airplane flight to a business meeting, or even your data, can be effected by a hurricane, a tornado, or as we saw (or should I say felt) yesterday, an earthquake. So how do you prepare for it? The answer is, the cloud.
Storing and archiving your data on-premise can be ideal for large corporations, ones that have the budget and staffing to manage the archive. Most enterprises have the resources to fund an on-premise archiving solution, as it requires significant upfront investment for estimated storage and a budget for an IT staff to manage the archive. However, what happens to that data if a hurricane storms through the town and damages your servers with terabytes of information stored on it? Or what if an earthquake rumbles through the building in which your on-premise archive is located?
This would give organizations reason to worry about data loss, but could be eliminated if they stored their data in the cloud. For example, in the Sonian Archive, your data is always available, searchable, and accessible, regardless of unexpected weather conditions.
Once you archive your data, Sonian uses GlobalRAID Infrastructure that immediately replicates your information to 8 data centers, geographically dispersed across the globe. With an on-premise solution, there is only one location of storage. Archiving data in the cloud eliminates the risk of losing your data from extreme weather conditions, and in Sonian’s case, if one data center was hit, there’s no need to worry because your company information is stored in seven other places.
By dispersing and duplicating data in geographically dispersed centers, it requires no cost or maintenance. Your data is also safe thanks to Sonian’s three-layer security system via industry standard encryption (Defense Department AES and SSL) certifying that encryption keys cannot be shared between customers.
With an on-premise solution, companies have to estimate the amount of servers and retention time needed for “x” amount of data. A cloud-powered solution, like Sonian’s, provides 11 9’s data resiliency and unlimited storage space. Archive data in the cloud requires no maintenance, hardware or software, while this could be a full time job for an IT department relying on an on-premise situation.
Essentially, would you rather worry about an entire archive; years, possibly decades of corporate information lost within a matter of minutes, or would you rather know that it is secure and safe in the cloud?
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