IT Support New York – What is the Cloud?

Many of the fears about storing data in the cloud are based on misinformation or misunderstanding. The power of cloud computing has been a huge advantage for most businesses and has allowed small players to compete at levels that would have been impossible for them even 5 years ago.

Put simply, “The Cloud” refers to the storage of data off-site so that it can accessed from anywhere in the world where an internet connection is available. The concept of the cloud is in itself somewhat of a misnomer as the data is still stored on a physical server, it just happens to not be on your business’s premises but instead in a data center or network of data centers controlled by a cloud services provider such as Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure. This allows users to upload and download business-critical data wherever they are. For a business this has a host of advantages, including…

Every document that your company requires can be uploaded to the cloud, organized and saved. Different documents and folders can be gated behind different levels of permission. Saved data is catalogued incrementally so accidentally deleted items can be easily restored.

This method of data retention removes physical hardware failures from the equation. Storing business-critical data on the internal drive of a $500 laptop has never been a good long-term solution and the task of constantly backing up data is one that is time-consuming and often gets ignored if it must be done manually.

When did you last copy your entire hard drive to an external device? Or made multiple backups of sensitive data? We all know that we should but almost everyone has a story about losing a day’s work because they forgot to back-up, some have even lost weeks’, months’ or even years’ worth of data because it was only stored in one location. By utilizing the cloud, your backups are stored off-premises meaning that even in the event of a disaster like a fire, flood or power surge you have a secure copy of your data which can be restored to any new location with internet access.

With cloud technology you can roll out changes to a document for your entire network. Multiple employees can work simultaneously on a document with their edits and additions appearing in real time to everyone in your organization. This facilitates greater collaboration and team work, even among employees that may not even be in the same country.

Working on documents in the cloud simplifies the process of collaboration and gets rid of those 70 message email chains with numerous versions of documents being passed back and forth with titles like proposal “v1.0.1.6 Final-final.doc”. Track and share all document changes from a single file in the cloud.

The ability to access documents from any device, anywhere in the world provides organizations with a level of flexibility that couldn’t have been possible even 5 years ago. Uploaded data is accessible immediately by any authorized personnel no matter where they are.

While no system can ever be 100% secure, by putting your data in the cloud you are entrusting it to some of the largest technology companies in the world, with decades of experience and expertise in securing data. Access to your data in the cloud can be granted via specific permissions for different departments or staff members depending on which data they need to be able to access and this access can be gated behind two-factor authentication (2FA), granting your data extra protection even if an employee’s password or machine is compromised.

An estimated 95% of cloud security failures are a result of user error, which is why it’s important that the migration of your data and management of your cloud services is administered by someone experience with these technologies. Someone like Carden IT.

Carden IT have shown companies of all sizes the possibilities of the cloud.