The Cloud as IT should Be low CosT, seCure, and relIaBle

usIng The BusIness ConTInuITy suITe for InexpensIve, flexIBle, Cloud-Based BaCkup and dIsasTer reCovery

| 2012 StorageCraft. All rights reserved.

InTroduCTIon

Imagine youre a victim of identity theft. You dont know how it happened, but youre checking your bank account and its totally empty. So is your savings account. Sure, your bank has anti-identity-theft measures in place, but those take time and you need money right now. But what if the bank told you they had a feature that allowed them to keep a secret shadow image of your account, complete with funds and accurate balance information? All you have to do is push a button, and the shadow account will supersede the account that was raided? Youll have immediate access to all your money right away. You already wish that button existed, dont you? The truth is that losing your data is like being robbed. When a disaster occurswhether its an operator error or an earthquakeyoure losing money every minute your

systems are down, and for businesses such a loss can be fatal. And as data becomes more and more integral to your business, the dangers of downtime will only increase. One study points out that between June 2010 and February 2012, the cost per hour of downtime increased by 38% percent.1 Unlike your actual money, however, you can have multiple instances of your data so you can get up and running as quickly as possible. With a backup and disaster recovery (BDR) plan, you can back up and have access to your data on-site while storing it at an offsite location in case of an emergency. A good BDR plan keeps multiple backups in a variety of locations. In the past, that meant saving your data to tapes and then physically moving them offsite.

| 2012 StorageCraft. All rights reserved.

lIvIng In The Cloud

Today, theres the cloud. Cloud storage isnt new. Its been around long enough that you probably have an idea of how it works. But the key word to truly understanding the cloud is simplicity. Securing tape backups in an offsite facility comes with all sorts of limitations and complications. Every single time you update your backup, you have to physically transport tapes of your data to the storage facility. You have to go to the facility to retrieve your backup. Your individual storage space has to be maintained. But cloud storage is simple. When you backup your data to the cloud, you transfer it via the Internet to a secure location (or ideally, multiple locations), far from the source. Because the transfer is digital, the version of your data stored in the cloud can synchronize with the data on your servers automatically, on a regular basis. The efficiency and convenience of cloud computing is making it an essential component of many business models. Businesses were predicted to spend 30% more on cloud services in 2011 than in 2010.2 IDC predicts that this will grow to $55 billion in cloud spending by 20143a conservative estimate compared to Gartners projection, which predicts $150 billion in cloud spending in 2013.4

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Cloud BenefITs

The benefits of cloud computing make it easy to see why businesses of all sizes are adopting cloud solutions. The cloud offers storage and BDR options that make better use of resources, ensure faster and more secure access to data, and anticipate and respond to BDR incidents with greater agility. Lets take a closer look at these advantages.

Anywhere Access
The strategic advantage of the cloud is that it maintains your data offsite. This means backed up data can be accessed and restored from anywhere with Internet access. In addition, administrators can monitor and manage backups remotely, allowing them to respond to a disaster much more efficiently. A potential drawback of universal access is security. If your data is just out there on a public cloud where you dont really have control of it, is it really safe? But a detailed report prepared by the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) found that while [t]he massive concentrations of resources and data present a more attractive target to attackerscloud-based defenses can be more robust, scalable and cost-effective.5 The paper points out that, among other things, cloud providers are able to deploy better security measures because they can purchase such measures more cheaply due to the scale of their operation. Carefully selecting a provider that makes security a priority can resolve most of the clouds security weaknesses.6

Resources
Perhaps the most obvious and compelling benefit of the cloud is economy. In a traditional IT environment, budgeting is very complicated, as the administrator must anticipate demand, then purchase and set up new hardware based on speculation. But cloud service providers prepare comprehensive IT services and sell them for a predictable fee, allowing the business administrator to accommodate a growing demand at the touch of a button. For businesses, a reliable cloud service can liberate IT staff to focus on more critical tasks. Instead of making expensive IT decisions based solely on predictions of data growth, cloud services allow a business to focus their resources on growth and still be confident in their BDR plan.

| 2012 StorageCraft. All rights reserved.

Cloud BenefITs, ConTInued

In any IT environment, of course, security is an issue, but as demand for cloud storage has increased, cloud providers have stepped up to close the gaps, making it possible for them to store data securely and run services reliably from virtually anywhere.

Agility
Businesses in todays vibrant and ever-changing market need to be more and more adaptable to changing trends and pressures. The ability to scale a business or repurpose data on the fly gives business owners and IT administrators more flexibility in how they respond to the needs of the market. The cloud offers additional flexibility in BDR. As mentioned, the ability to acquire storage only as needed and to have access to it immediately is valuable to any business. In addition, the ability to shift data and services from one server in one location to a different server in another location during a disaster is a powerful tool for businesses as they develop and deploy their BDR plans. This is particularly useful from the perspective of security, since the cloud allows the cloud provider to dynamically reallocate resources for filtering, traffic shaping, authentication, encryption, etc., to defensive measures7 If agility is a key component for success in todays world, then cloud computing is an incredibly useful resource.

| 2012 StorageCraft. All rights reserved.

prICe and speeddrawBaCks of The TradITIonal Cloud Model

As promising as the cloud is, the current cloud model has one crucial disadvantage: cloud storage simply cannot compete with local storage on price. Though the cloud eliminates the need for expensive upfront hardware purchases and long term procurement planning, prices can still be significant. Since most cloud storage solutions are priced per gigabyte (ranging from 50 cents to four or five dollars), the cost to a growing business with ever-increasing data can balloon rapidly. This makes perfect sense when you consider that most cloud solutions today are centralized solutions, meaning that all the data in the cloud is stored in and run from one or more data centers filled with servers. Building and running data centers are extremely expensive, not to mention the cost of securing the bandwidth to operate cloud services. And customers shoulder that cost. Depending on how much data a business is trying to store, this can present a significant financial burden. You can purchase a 2TB hard drive for less than $100, yet for a company to protect that same amount of data in the cloud with a traditional provider they must pay over $12,000 per year (assuming the low end of 50 cents per GB, per month). Of course, cloud services offer more than just storage, but the discrepancy in those prices is still too large to account for managed services alone. Another drawback to centralized cloud solutions is the fact that only so much information can be sent through the pipes at any given time. It doesnt matter how much bandwidth you have at your disposal, you can only move data as fast as the cloud providers connection. This makes backup and disaster recovery tricky at times. If our imaginary 2 TB server crashes, trying to pull all that data down from the cloud is an arduous process that might prove fatal for the company. Consider, too, that many cloud service providers throttle their network connections, slowing down the transfer even more.

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BusIness ConTInuITy suITe

Considering all of this, creating a reliable BDR plan that includes both local and offsite backup can be a daunting task. To take full advantage of the cloud, you have to find the best cloud service for your money, ensure that it integrates easily with your local backup, refine settings that allow you to control file sizes so transfers dont bog down, and streamline the process as a whole. Because of the difficulty of truly taking advantage of the cloud as a BDR component, software developer StorageCraft has partnered their award-winning ShadowProtect BDR software with the innovative geodistributed storage cloud offered by Symform. The Business Continuity Suite, powered by StorageCraft and Symform, is a full-service BDR solution that allows you to seamlessly create powerful and flexible local backups, and then transfer them to the least expensive cloud available, the Symform Cloud Storage Network.

Using this best-in-class technology allows you to back up your data quickly and efficiently. The ability to set up custom backup schedules makes it even easier to protect your information and lessens the burden on your IT administrator. Also, because the process is so easy, theres no problem creating local backups for quick recovery of minor disasters in addition to offsite backups for recovery from catastrophic failure. ShadowProtect is more than just a backup agent. After all, what good are backups if you cannot easily recover them during a disaster? ShadowProtect makes the disaster recovery process run smoothly and comprehensively, offering hardware agnostic and bare metal restores, as well as virtual technologies that make it possible to restore in mere minutes.

SymformUnlimited Storage for a Low Flat Fee

Once the backup images are saved, Symform automatically makes sure all the backup images are replicated to the Symform Cloud Storage Network. With Symform you always have the most recent backup stored offsite Symform has improved upon the clouds existing advantages and developed innovative solutions to its aforementioned failings. Most impressively, Symform is significantly more affordable than competing products. The Symform Cloud Storage Network is a decentralized cloud, with a peer-to-peer approach to data backup. Users pledge disk space on their own on-premise devices equal to the amount of storage they will consume in the Symform

StorageCraft ShadowProtect
You start by creating a local backup using StorageCraft ShadowProtect. ShadowProtect takes a disk image of your entire machine at a specific point in time, including OS, drivers, settings, and so on, allowing you to restore your computer to any piece of hardware exactly as it was. Additionally, this snapshot makes it possible for ShadowProtect to continually back up your data issuing incremental or differential disk images. These images are much smaller and much easier to manage during interaction with the cloud.
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| 2012 StorageCraft. All rights reserved.

BusIness ConTInuITy suITe, ConTInued

cloud. Symform aggregates that disk space to create a redundant, decentralized, geo-distributed cloud storage network. So the Symform user pays one flat fee, with no per-gigabyte additions, for a secure and reliable storage solution that makes the cloud-based BDR plan a reality. to fail at the same time for just a shred of data to be lost. And RSA continuously monitors devices in the cloud for availability. Anytime a device is found to be unavailable the system automatically regenerates and redistributes the lost fragments. When you choose the Business Continuity Suite, youre choosing uncompromising cloud speed. Because the files created by ShadowProtect are smaller than normal backup files; and because files in the Symform Cloud Storage Network travel to and from unrelated devices via parallel Internet connections, upload and recovery happen much more quickly. Symform even allows you to replicate the backed up files to a device at an additional offsite locationsuch as an outsourced IT service providers office, a co-location facility or even a business owners homefor added security. Symforms Instant Restore technology ensures this device is always kept in sync with the cloud, so your data is protected and accessible whenever you need it.

More Secure and Reliable

Symform also offers unbeatable security through their Resilient Storage Architecture (RSA). RSA applies a unique 256-bit key to each block of data added to the cloud, then shreds every single block and adds 50% redundancy to create 96 fragments which are distributed to 96 individual devices throughout the cloud. This keeps your data safe from perpetrators, who, in order to reassemble just a single block of one file, would have to locate and breach the correct 96 devices, locate and extract the hidden fragments, reassemble the fragments into a block, and then break the military-grade encryption. RSA also keeps your data safe from disasters. Because only 64 of the 96 fragments of a block are needed to reconstruct the block, 33 geographically unrelated disks would have

| 2012 StorageCraft. All rights reserved.

ConClusIon

Your data is as precious as your money, and for IT administrators and business owners, a BDR plan including both local and offsite backup is a must. Increasingly, the best offsite solutions lie in the cloud, though most cloud solutions today still carry some significant limitations and drawbacks. By choosing the Business Continuity Suite by StorageCraft and Symform, youre not only buying the most robust, comprehensive backup services available for your data, youre protecting those backups both offsite and locally, and enabling disaster recovery thats flexible and fast. The Business Continuity Suite is an affordable, reliable solution that uses the cloud to its full advantage. Protect your money. Protect your data. Take care of your business. Well take care of the rest.

| 2012 StorageCraft. All rights reserved.

noTes

1. Datacenter Downtime: How Much Does It Really Cost? Aberdeen Group, March 2012. 3. 2. Gens, Frank. 10 Predictions. IDC Predictions 2011: Welcome to the New Mainstream. IDG, 2011. http:// www.idc.com/research/predictions11/downloads/ IDCPredictions2011_WelcometotheNewMainstream. pdf. 6. 3. Ibid. 4. Williams, Alex. Merrill Lynch: Cloud Computing Market Will Reach $160 Billion...Really?. ReadWriteWeb, 25 November, 2009. http://www. readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2009/11/merrill-lynchcloud-computing.php. Accessed 17 January, 2012. 5. Catteddu, Daniele and Hogben, Giles. Cloud Computing: Benefits, Risks and Recommendations for Information Security. European Network and

Information Security Agency. http://www.enisa.europa. eu/act/rm/files/deliverables/cloud-computing-riskassessment. 4. 6. Ibid. 78. 7. Ibid. 8.

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| 2012 StorageCraft. All rights reserved.