Data Recovery Digest

There’s no doubt about it: more and more businesses are making use of cloud storage. While already popular with consumers thanks to services like Dropbox, enterprise uptake took a bit longer due to security concerns. While those issues certainly still exist – and are perhaps more prevalent nowadays – many have come to use the cloud due to its accessibility, cost effectiveness and ease of use.

Whereas before businesses would have had to keep their data internally, storing it in the cloud allows them to free up physical and digital space. Not only that, but the data can be accessed from wherever the user is and across a variety of devices, which is hugely important to modern businesses in a connected age.

Recent research published by Gigaom Research and CipherCloud has investigated the adoption rate of cloud storage and also some of the hesitations that users have with the technology. The report, named Shadow IT: Data Protection and Cloud Security, aims to help managers avoid situations where they could lose their data. Data loss is a common problem that impacts a huge number of businesses, so it’s vital that preparation is undertaken to avoid it.

The study estimated that the cloud computing market will grow by 126.5 percent over the next year. On top of this they believed that there would be a 199 percent increase in software-as-a-service and a 126 percent rise in infrastructure-as-a-service.

While many firms are adopting cloud storage as previously mentioned, there are still those who are hesitant to do so. The study found that 62 percent of businesses were not willing to investigate in the cloud due to their concerns with security. After the NSA revelations this is hardly surprising, especially if the cloud being used isn’t a private one.

“The research underscores the rapid adoption of the cloud by businesses both by IT and line of business employees. It also reinforces security as a key concern and the importance of encryption to ensure data is fully protected and controlled,” noted Paige Leidig, chief marketing officer at CipherCloud.

44 percent of respondents said that they weren’t certain about the capabilities of the technology. Businesses need to be certain that what they are investing in is going to last a long time and is also going to provide the performance needed. Whereas individual consumers can be more flexible with their choices, dropping services fairly easily, for a business it is a vast undertaking that requires a lot of investigation and integration.

Finally, 41 percent of respondents said that their own ability to use cloud technology efficiently is off-putting, which suggests that the market has a way to go in educating the benefits to using the cloud.

However, cloud is still very popular, but with this comes an issue with data recovery. Although some firms might opt to have their own cloud storage infrastructure (which is very likely the case for large enterprises who can afford to do so and it is efficient for), many might choose third-party services that are available online.

Although these services have their benefits, especially for small businesses, it takes away a certain element of control over the data. This is a worry if the business isn’t storing their data efficiently. It is always best to have multiple copies of your data, but if the only available copy is in the cloud then that could have serious repercussions in an outage or after data loss.

While data recovery can be performed on physical drives and storage mediums (thanks to tools like R-Studio, for example), the same cannot be done on cloud storage. This is because that data lies with the company who is hosting the service. As such, if they don’t have secondary copies of your data then there’s no way of getting it back.

As such, it’s vital that businesses store their data across a variety of different facilities, both on and off site. While no storage plan is ever fool-proof, it’s much better to do this than to just rely on a single copy.