Online Storage - more than just file sharing

Danny Bradbury talks to Mark Lomas, IT Consultant at Icomm Technologies, about how businesses are using online storage as software as a service and how it has become more than just file sharing.

Mark Lomas

Mark Lomas is a professional IT consultant with 15 years experience. He has a background in IT engineering and technical deployments across a wide range of products and solutions. Mark regularly engages directly with customers as part of his day-to-day involvement in IT project planning and technical design work.

Danny Bradbury

Danny Bradbury is a freelance technology journalist with 20 years' experience. He has written extensively for the Guardian, the Independent, the Financial Times, Backbone Magazine, the National Post and MSN in Canada, amongst numerous tech trade media.

Transcript of Online Storage episode with Danny Bradbury and Mark Lomas.

Danny Bradbury: Hi, welcome to the Icomm Technologies pod cast. This is Mark Lomas IT consultant with Icomm and Mark you have been kind enough to come on the line with us today. The first pod cast that I am putting together concerns online storage and I want to know a little bit more about what this actually is, when we talk about online storage for small businesses and larger companies, what are we actually saying, what are we talking about?

Mark Lomas: Okay so, really what we are talking about particularly in the arena of business services is providing software as a service, cloud storage so people are not really looking for just a giant box to put their data in, they are really looking for things like on line email services, they are looking for online document services including document management and the ability to access and edit their documents online, so people don’t just want to file share anymore, they just want somewhere where they can start to actually get their software services from and have everything stored there, but also deliver through to them the sort of features that they would typically be provisioning on premises with their own servers.

DB: That sounds like it has a lot of benefits, could you talk over some of the key reasons that people might chose to use online storage rather than storage directly attached to their computers?

ML: Okay, so what a lot of people are generally looking for when they are moving from having their own storage locally to having things stored in the cloud with online storage providers is firstly, they might be looking for greater reliability so they might be looking to have their data stored online where someone else can back it up, where someone else has got vast data centre resources available at their disposal where they have got lots of redundancy so that they can be relatively sure that they won’t be affected by the sort of failures that might affect their own local systems and their own local servers and computers. Second of all they might be looking to gain access to more features so whilst a business might be able to sort of put in a small collection of storage, they might be limited in terms of the size and the features and the functionality they can get out of that. Whereas with an online data centre, there might be all sorts of services and features available that they could deploy. And finally of course price, people might be looking to move from a model where they have to pay out quite a lot of money upfront in order to deploy storage, and deploy systems to a model where they can pay as they go, just buy what they need and pay more on a sort of subscription basis, rather than having to shell out the money all upfront.

DB: It all sounds very convenient but I guess the thing that worries me is reliability you know there’s my storage up there in the cloud somewhere where I’m not quite sure where it is, all my bits and bytes might be spread around multiple different hard drives and if I can’t see it, I’m not necessarily sure it’s going to work all the time. How do I know that online storage is going to be reliable enough to meet my needs?

ML: Well this is one of the pitfalls that you have got to watch out for, obviously many businesses are looking for greater reliability and some of the services on offer, you’ve got vendors like Microsoft and Google with some of their offerings where they are providing online storage and online business services, however you’ve got to be careful about what it is you are getting into. First of all you mentioned about where your data might be housed, well many of these services will reserve the right to store the data outside of the country in which you are operating so it could be stored anywhere, obviously they have invested in billions of dollars worth of data centre and they are not going to do that again and again in every country that they operate so your data could find itself being housed anywhere. You don’t really have a huge amount of say on where the data actually goes. When it comes to reliability, well again as I mentioned earlier most people are comparing this up against just installing their own systems locally but if we talk about putting a server in for example, most people these days will know that if you deploy a server and you install it correctly and get it in properly and maintain it and its in the right environment, that server will run and run for hopefully years and many servers indeed do run for years without even needing to be restarted or rebooted so reliability is usually pretty good. So what can online storage offer us up against that? Only as recently as last month for example the work outages in the likes of Microsoft’s Office 365 and Google doc services, so it’s not all a completely perfect picture. You can never really completely get away from the dreaded down time, the dreaded scenario of a server failure or something going off line that affects your services and indeed just yesterday for example, we had an issue with Blackberry services which I believe is potentially recurring today if we have a look around on some of the chatter on Twitter at the moment. So reliability isn’t ever going to be 100% but then again most of the providers don’t actually promise 100% uptime, you are usually talking about something like a 99.9% uptime guarantee for example, but that’s one of things to look at, look at the uptime guarantee, look at what kind of reimbursement the companies will offer you if the services are down for beyond a few hours for example. Are they going to give you credit, are they going to give you something back, what are they going to do for you in terms of guaranteeing the services are up and what kind of promises have they put in place to make sure that they are obliged to do that and that it’s worth their while making sure that those services are online, so it’s a good idea to take a look at the small print and see what’s there.

DB: Great, now if it does go down at a critical point in my working day, what can I do to protect myself, I mean do I just lose that productivity time or is there some way that I can sort of back stop my storage so that at least I can have some kind of productivity if there is a system outage?

ML: Well as with most approaches to IT there’s the extreme of going to the scenario whereby you have all your data stored locally and then you could go to the other extreme where it’s all stored online or all up in the cloud. Now there’s of course an approach where we say well let’s have a look at some sort of middle ground, is there some way that we can have our data stored in the cloud so that we get the benefits of it being backed up and protected by these large organisations that are able to offer these services and then they will look at having maybe an offline copy, something synchronised down to each work station or to some local storage somewhere, so that if the worst happens and the internet connection goes down or the provider has a failure of some kind it doesn’t affect your ability to access your data and have it available so many users will look at that as a way to make sure that they have access to the data when they need it, particularly potentially their own personal files, their own home folders and their own documents for example. Having an offline synchronised copy is one way to make sure that your data is accessible, even when you’re not able to get to an internet connection or if a failure is occurring.

DB: Brilliant, so you get the flexibility of online storage but you do get the chance to sort of carry on working with your critical files if the system goes out for a while. Now what about accessing this data on the road? I mean more and more workers are mobile of course and they are going to need to get their data from anywhere, could you talk about accessing say over 3G networks or over WIFI networks when you’re travelling?

ML: Well of course availability of an internet connection is hugely important if your data is all stored in the cloud, without an internet connection then you’re kind of out of touch with your data, you’ve not got access to it so there are a couple of things that people can do here to try and make sure that they have access to their data if they are travelling and they are mobile. The first thing is to look at the availability of 3G internet connectivity so these days many people will have a Smartphone that they can potentially tether to a lap top or tablet or maybe they will have a 3G dongle of some kind that can be plugged into their tablet or lap top so that they can gain internet access wherever they might happen to be. Obviously the perfect scenario is to try and find a wireless hot spot and there are plenty of those available these days but you are always going to find yourself in a place where you might not have that available to you and so it’s good to have something a bit more universally available like a 3G connection so that you can access your data. The other thing that you can do is again look at ways that you can synchronise local copies of your data so that if you are travelling, that you think you are likely to be out of reach of a hot spot and maybe in an area where the coverage isn’t so great then again having that off line copy so that you can keep hold of that when you need it, is quite useful but this is also a concern for many businesses, if users are able to take a copy of the data with them on a tablet or lap top, security is potentially an issue. Many people will want to think about what happens if I lose my lap top or I lose my tablet what kind of data are we going to allow those users to take with them if it is sensitive data so these things are a bit of a balancing act between making sure people have got connectivity and access to the data but also with security, people need to think about what data people are going to be able to take with them wherever they go.

DB: Well that leads nicely into my other question about security which is about security of data stored up there in the cloud. I guess you are going to look for things like encryption but where should data be encrypted and how and what kind of bench marks can you use to ensure that your data is secure, especially if it sensitive data like customer information for example?

ML: Well when it comes to securing the data there are a couple of areas that people want to look at. People first of all want to know that the data once it is stored in that data centre with one of the big providers, that it is going to be secured in a manner that means that not just anybody could access the data, even people working for that service provider offering you that on line storage shouldn’t really be able to gain access to sensitive business information that really belongs to the customer but again it’s a case of double check the small print, have a look at what access that particular provider has to your data and find out whether or not that is suitable for the sort of information you want to store online. Secondly when we’re looking at how the data is accessed over the internet most providers will offer encryption in such a fashion that once the data is being transferred over the internet between your computer and the on line system, its secured in some way and again most providers will offer some sort of information about what kind of guarantees they can give you for how secure that information access will be but of course it’s still going to be down to the same sort of security vulnerabilities that have always been there in the past so making sure that user names and passwords are secure maybe thinking about two factor authentication but when we get onto that kind of thing. You want to double check with the provider what kind of additional security mechanisms you can put in place that will work alongside their own authentication and verification methods when it comes to making sure that you are who you say you are. Plenty of companies will deploy things like a sort of two factor authentication scheme but is that something that you’ll be able to go to your provider and plug into their systems and make it work with them. It’s always worthwhile finding out and double checking.

DB: Brilliant, okay so just to sum up, cloud based storage can offer you flexibility, can offer you more bang for your buck when it comes to storing your data but be careful about which supplier you choose, make sure your data is secure wherever its stored and also make sure that you have some kind of critical copy back up so that you can carry on working if there is a system outage. Well Mark that’s been really, really, helpful, thanks so much again for coming on the pod cast and we will speak to you next time.

ML: Thanks very much indeed.

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