Cloud Archive By: Kimberly Nolan

What it is?  The goal of a cloud archiving service is to provide a data storage (ex. Google drive and SkyDrive) as a service.  It is optimized for  long-term data retention  security  compliance with data regulation policies.  suited to organizations that don’t have the experience or resources to maintain private archiving storage infrastructure

Trusting the Cloud  Data must be easily searchable via metadata.  Protected from overwrites or tampering.  Provide client- or legally specified, automatically applied data retention policies.  You must also have confidence that your data is in safe hands and protected by sound disaster recovery systems.

Cloud Backup Vs Traditional Backups Cloud Backup  Time: long/slow recovery time  Quality: low durability, user error prone  Cost: capital intensive (purchasing extra hardware) with ongoing upgrades  Effort: difficult to maintain Traditional Backup  Time: depends on internet connection  Quality: uploaded data could be copied into several places at once in order to make it even more secure  Cost: low cost; choose the required amount of storage and expand it gradually  Effort: signup and choose when to backup and server does the rest

Advantages of cloud archiving  Cost of implementation and maintenance of private archival storage, especially for organizations with large data retention obligations.  With cloud archiving, there are many choices available with regard to how and where archives are hosted and how users can access their archived data.  Reliability is a key factor for choosing a backup method. Even though you may get a virus or Trojan which destroys your hardware and you can replace it, you cannot get your data back once its lost. With cloud backup you don’t have to worry.  Easy to use. With cloud backup, setting up the solution involves the simple process of signing up online and installing a small client on the computer or server. Within minutes, you can begin backing up files.  Securing your data now has a unique 256 bit encryption key that you choose to ensure that files cannot be accessed by others.

Types of Cloud Storage  Public cloud storage  provides storage to the public mostly by means of the internet by a third party provider, which deliver services to multiple business  Private cloud storage  provides storage services similar to the public cloud, but is dedicated to a single business  Hybrid cloud storage  is an approach to managing storage that uses both local and off-site resources through a third party service

What types of cloud archive services exist?  Amazon Web Service (AWS)  Amazon Glacier (more affordable)  Oracle Storage  Google Docs  EMC  Microsoft Azure  …the list goes on and on (most computer manufactures come with their own cloud storage)