Being prepared for when the cloud REALLY fails

Consider the Microsoft so-called "Leap year" bug that crippled that company's Azure cloud services last month. Bill Laing, vice president for Microsoft's server and cloud division, described the system failure in a blog post and said that Microsoft will overhaul its disaster recovery efforts, as then as other aspects of the business.

Nonetheless, it's a certain reminder of how things can -- and will -- go wrong in cloud services and that each organization is responsible for their own business continuity.

About a year ago, TAPS began moving away from its on-premise productivity and office software to Google's Gmail and Google Apps. "We were relying on our own services and virtual private networks, nevertheless it was clunky and at times the connection simply didn't work. Switching to cloud services made sense and is easier for our people to use," says Wellington.

To back up their cloud-based data, TAPS turned to startup Backupify, a provider of cloud-based data archiving, search and restore services for online services just as Google Apps, and social networks just as Facebook and Twitter. Late last month, Backupify as well released its Snapshot for Salesforce, which saves a copy of one's Salesforce backup on Backupify servers and as well provides the ability to download the Salesforce.com data for onsite backup.

Wellington and TAPS aren't the only businesses concerned about ensuring they have access to their cloud data. According to Ben Thomas, vice president of product and security at Backupify, the company has more than 300,000 accounts for in broad outline 2,000 business clients and they protect roughly 250 TB of data.

This paper examines recent IDG technology among IT leaders, who share their concerns and strategies in addressing security in cloud computing environments.

This IDC Vendor Profile analyzes Box, a company playing in the public cloud advanced storage services market and the content management and collaboration market, and reviews key success factors: market potential, innovation/solution, corporate strategy, force multipliers, and clients. The company, headquartered in Palo Alto, California, has over 8 million users and is growing quickly in the file synchronization and collaboration market. Leveraging IDC's expert understanding of the competitive landscape and future outlook, this document highlights company and market information tailored to the investment professional's needs.

Collaboration and content sharing are not, clearly, new concepts. However cloud computing has changed the nature of collaboration, content sharing, document storage and project management to enable more efficient, faster-acting and cost-effective enterprises. According to a new study by IDG Innovation, the vast majority of knowledge workers placed a very high level of importance on collaborating with internal coworkers and external stakeholders, and having access to the most up-to-date corporate information. Read how organizations are realizing massive productivity gains by transitioning their content management solutions to cloud-based models.