Although the cloud does bring a wealth of business benefits, it’s important to find the right ‘cloud balance’ for your business. By this we mean a complimentary architecture that supports both cloud and on-premises hardware to provide your business with the best of both worlds. Cloud computing offers flexibility and elasticity, but it’s also important to remain vigilant and realistic by considering what data is stored where.
You may already be using the cloud effectively, but there are some who risk racking up high costs, leaving data at risk, falling short of GDPR or violating other internal or external compliance rules. As with most things, finding the perfect balance can help you utilize the cloud to its full potential.
By keeping unstructured or cold data in the cloud for long periods of time, you’re guaranteed to see your cloud spending sky rocket. Organizations pay based on capacity and as the amount of space needed increases, so does the cost. Likewise, when it comes to highly sensitive data, by keeping this on-premises you can have greater peace of mind and control. The cloud does not offer a comprehensive feature set to protect against human error, malicious attack, ransomware or software corruption – so by bringing your most secure data on-site you can add additional layers of protection.
The Assureon Cloud Transfer (ACT) is designed with this in mind, allowing you to migrate data easily between the cloud and the Assureon platform. ACT allows you to take advantage of the best features of the cloud, while offloading cold data and highly sensitive information to a secure on-premises Assureon active archive. This is far better for long-term protection and preservation. This also reduces the accumulating premium costs associated with keeping data in the public cloud, providing data portability while reducing risk of cloud vendor lock in. Because of this you can have a balanced combination, utilizing the cloud for some aspects of your business and on-prem storage for others.
Assureon also brings a wealth of security and data protection features, to give you that additional peace of mind. It implements a unique file fingerprinting and asset serialization process, combined with metadata authenticated by a private blockchain. This enables you to automate integrity audits, providing positive assurance of the completeness and authenticity of business records – to meet any compliance and industry regulations such as HIPAA, SEC17a-4, and GDPR. Assureon’s powerful suite of defenses also protect against ransomware.
We have seen the industry talk about the cloud OR on-premises, but the truth is, implementing a cloud AND an on-premise strategy brings a far greater range of benefits!
Shoeb Master, Product Manager