Are Cloud Storage Providers Prioritizing Your Data Protection?

Are Cloud Storage Providers Prioritizing Your Data Protection?
Six Questions You Need to Ask

By Camille Kapoor, senior product manager, Barracuda Networks, Inc., in the company since 2006

All you have to do is search Google for cloud provider or cloud backup to quickly find an endless number of vendors claiming to offer the best, simplest and most affordable service. These claims might be true, but more importantly, before you trust one with your business-critical data – asking them a few questions to ensure your data is their priority, can go a long way.

Here are a few questions to ask providers that will help you make the right choice, or re-evaluate your current service when the time comes.

1. Are there any hidden costs?
There’s no need to complicate the IT budget with hidden fees, however, it happens far too often because vendors don’t lay out all of the costs up front. Depending of the vendor, moving data to the cloud could mean that there are hidden costs or charges for additional levels of redundancy, possibly causing people to choose a less redundant solution than they should because cost is prohibitive. A low cost/GB looks attractive, but there may be associated costs for data transfers. It’s important to know what happens once your storage limit is reached and if the service can easily scale as data grows. Additionally, there’s a risk in paying for more storage than you need if your data isn’t stored efficiently. Backing up data to the cloud should be simple and you shouldn’t need to pay for additional software to manage replication. Bottom line – predictable pricing shouldn’t be a challenge.

2. Will I get charged to move data out of the service?
At some point down the road, you may need to restore your files or pull them out of the service. If this is the case, you shouldn’t have to make decisions based on cost – especially in a restore scenario that could be critically impacting your business. It’s important to know if you’ll be charged to restore data back to your network, what those costs are, and that it doesn’t cause an additional burden on your network in the process. Restoring individual files shouldn’t be asking a lot of your cloud provider. Some services don’t allow recovery of individual files without having to restore an entire volume or backup set, so determining the level of granularity options could prove to be valuable in the future.

3. What happens to my data if the service goes out of business?
This is the question no one wants to think about, but it’s an important one because if your provider goes under – you’ll be the one scrambling around to ensure that your data is safely moved to another service. You’ll want to determine what it will take to get your data out of the service before you decide to sign on as a customer. Will you be able to easily restore your backups locally, or will you have to purchase hardware or pay additional fees? And, can you do it on your own or will you need assistance from the providers’ support staff? This will help you determine how labor intensive the process of transferring your data to another service or solution will be, and if you can afford it if the vendor actually goes out of business.

4. How much additional management is required?  
The adoption of cloud technologies was driven by the decision to make things simple, so when choosing a cloud provider, it’s important to understand the technology behind the service to determine if it can actually deliver the simplicity you need. Setup and management simplicity can be solid indicators of the complexity level in a service. Some setups are simple and remain that way during management, while others require more overhead in the management phase. What happens if your production data increases? Does the cloud storage scale automatically or do you need to take additional actions for an increase? Can you simply access everything through the same portal or do you need to log in separately for local and offsite storage?

5. Do you offer more than just cloud storage?
Using a different vendor for each IT function or product can get old, and you never know if you’ll run into compatibility issues down the road even if everything seems fine initially. If your cloud storage provider is just that, a cloud storage provider – what additional services do they offer to ensure your data integrity and BC? Consider a provider that has your data protection in mind. Being able to leverage the same vendor for multiple solutions like backup, archiving, email security, and other services has the potential to save a lot of time on many fronts and eliminate compatibility issues.

6. How do I know that you have my data protection in mind?
You can learn a lot about a provider’s data protection expertise if they are outsourcing customers’ data instead of hosting it in their own cloud. Whether outsourced or not, any provider should be able to explain how your data is replicated to validate the security and integrity of the service. For example, if they are outsourcing, what kind of relationship do they have with the third party and how does the customer support model work if you run into data transfer or recovery issues? Or, will they only provide coverage for a portion of your data protection strategy? Having these details sorted out will provide valuable insight into what you’d be up against during a recovery.

It might seem like there’s a lot to consider, but if you just take a few minutes to ask the right questions before moving your data to the cloud – your journey will be a success. After all, the whole point to backup and recovery relies on the ability to easily re-capture your data when things don’t go as planned. Your provider should understand this and be able to map out a simple process of how quickly and easily you will be able to get your data back after files are lost.