Services in the Cloud

The move to offering services through the cloud is showing no sign of losing any momentum at the moment, and why should it, when there are several advantages to be had. With perhaps the most significant of those being is the reduction in cost to be achieved when compared to hosting similar capabilities in your own network.

In fact the costs of setting up a product such as Microsoft Exchange can be so high that many small business are put off by it, even when bundled with Windows Server in Small Business Server. Products like Exchange quite often require specialised expert help to configure which only adds to the expense.

If hosted locally they must also be backed up properly, which is another headache for the small business owner to have to deal with. For many businesses the resident IT expert is either a knowledgeable staff member or the owner, certainly not someone who would have the skill set to configure, maintain and backup a product like Exchange.

Many cloud services have service level agreements stating that they will be available for a certain percentage of time, quite often this is in the magnitude of 99.9%. Some services back this with a financial commitment, in that if they fail to meet that level you get a refund. In practice what this also means is that the service will have its own disaster recovery procedures, so that it can meet that service level, and in so doing it means that they have to worry about backup not you.

That doesn't mean that you shouldn't look after your data, in fact you should ensure that you can access your data and perhaps have your own backup for circumstances such as when a document, email or database record is incorrectly deleted. But from the point of view of recovery from fire or theft in your own premises your data is safe in the cloud.

But data safety also means that it should be secure, and with certain data we have a legal obligation to ensure that it is so. That might mean that certain services aren't an appropriate location for certain data to be saved, perhaps because they are more consumer oriented with weaker encryption or other protection from unauthorised access. But the appropriate level of security very much depends upon the nature of the data and its confidentiality.