Not All Clouds Are Equal

As a successful VAR or MSP, you fully understand that data is the lifeline of your customer’s business. As your client’s trusted advisor, not only have you kept local backups of their data, but you have also replicated these offsite to ensure that your customer can access these at all times and keep their business running in the face of any disaster. When deciding where to replicate this data, there are a number of key considerations including: how quickly can you restore the data, how complicated is it to restore the data, can you restore in all scenarios …

Third party Data Centre or In-House Cloud? The Burning Question …

If, like a growing number of companies, you have decided to replicate your customers’ data to the cloud, you need to decide if you will build your own cloud offering or go with a third party cloud offering. This is an important decision for any VAR or MSP. One of the potential pitfalls for any service provider is to try to be all things to all people. Data centre specialisation may well be one area you might want to leave to a third party provider. A number of questions you need to consider when making the decision include:

• Do you have the upfront funds needed to invest in the required infrastructure?
• Do you have the capacity to build in the redundancy to offer 99.999% uptime to your clients?
• Do you need to hire expert staff or retrain existing staff to build out your cloud offering?
• Are you confident that your cloud is compliant with GDPR and other compliance regulations?

For the increasing numbers of service providers looking to outsource their Disaster Recovery Cloud, here are some important considerations:

• Look for a purpose-built Disaster Recovery cloud as opposed to a cloud simply offering storage. This will be essential to ensure you meet the Service Level Agreements put in place with your customers. If you need to restore your customers’ data within 2 hours, it will not be enough to simply store data in certain public clouds from which it may take days or weeks to restore from.
• How complicated will it be to restore from the cloud? This needs to be quick, seamless and easy. You need to be able to sleep at night knowing with full confidence that you will be able to restore your customer and offer total failover in the cloud.
• Can you easily and regularly test recovery from the cloud? You need to regularly test and show your customer that you can restore their data quickly. (This will be essential when GDPR comes into force.)
• Pick a self-service cloud that puts you in control. Adding or deleting accounts should be simple. It is imperative you can restore your customers’ data easily, without intervention from a third party.
• Cost of the Cloud offering: You want to grow your company revenue so you need to choose a solution that will allow you to wrap services around your cloud offering and make a decent margin.
• Choose an EU data centre and confirm that your customers’ data does not travel outside the EU.

Enterprise Cloud Failover in the Flick of a Switch

StorageCraft Technology offers complete on-site and off-site Disaster Recovery. With the ability to restore and failover entire systems to the StorageCraft purpose-built Disaster Recovery Cloud, the company offers an enterprise Disaster Recovery solution:

• Failover in the Cloud
• 99.999% uptime
• Restore customers remotely in minutes
• Self-service, one-stop portal
• Predictable monthly billing, no hidden fees
• Flexible service levels
• One-click site-wide failover testing without disrupting production environment

In today’s fast-paced and “always on” technology landscape, being down and out for a few hours, let alone a day or more, just is not an option for most companies. StorageCraft offers a highly customisable disaster recovery cloud, allowing you to replicate backups remotely and to provide data recovery and instant virtualisation of machines in the cloud. Check out our webinars where we “take a look under the hood” of StorageCraft Cloud Services and other solutions.