Things to consider about the LinkedIn password hack

John P. makes good points

Thoughts on Cloud Backup adoption by the SMB market

I have read a few articles lately regarding the adoption of Cloud based backup by the SMB market. There seems to be some question as to why this adoption is accelerating. The experts like to point out that most solutions don't even offer proper version history for files. Then there are the typical performance issues of backing up and recovering data across the Internet. So what is driving this increased adoption of basic Cloud based backup within the SMB community?

In my opinion the biggest factor is something that I learned years ago when I was just out of school and found myself selling Life Insurance for New York Life. Simply put, something is better than nothing. Many SMBs have struggled with traditional methods of data protection. Many lack redundant DR locations so they have historically used local media. Tapes are a nightmare to manage. Validating backed up data by test restore is only done a fraction of the time. The IT staff in a typical SMB simply can't know or show with any certainty that their data has been backed up, is valid, and can be restored in a timely fashion to meet their SLAs. Of course there are many more advanced and expensive DP solutions that can be implemented, but remember we are talking about a small IT staff and tight budgets at your typical SMB.

Cloud based backups to the rescue. There are several positives from an SMB perspective to Cloud backup. Lower initial investment in hardware, software, and qualified staff are just a few.  Access to the data from any Internet connection versus tapes locked away inside some mountain is also extremely important. Now when the one and only Systems Admin quits the boss can still get access to the data without having to be an admin themselves. There is a certain piece of mind that comes with logging in and seeing all of the data in tact. Not to mention that it is much easier to actually perform test restores from the Cloud.

I expect to see this trend of adoption continue. I also expect that the next step past just basic data backup to the Cloud will be true Cloud based DR. Even past that you will see the SMB adopting Hybrid, Private, and even Public Cloud  models with increasing frequency. Staffs are limited, office space is at a premium, budgets are tight, and to be successful an SMB must be agile. It just makes sense.

Gladinet + S3 = piece of mind

I just finished my initial backup of my personal data to Amazon S3 and I feel at ease knowing I could lose everything here in my office, but still have my data in the cloud. Things like family photos and videos are priceless to me. Ever see anyone after a house fire? What is the one thing they always mention? Photo albums... Memories. In our family (yours too probably) we have all of our pictures, movies, and music in digital format. I have a lot of other documents and work that I have done over the years that I wouldn't want to lose as well. I am sure you feel the same way.

My cloud on boarding method of choice? First I upgraded to Gladinet Pro. This is a great little app and it was only $50. Then I added my Amazon S3 bucket to Gladinet and I was ready to create a backup job. I spent some time purging superfluous data on my Stora NAS device first. Did I mention that unlike Mozy and Carbonite my data doesn't have to reside on a local drive with this setup? Once my job was configured I let it run for about 2 days. I left the job in "instant mode" so any changes to the source data are copied to S3 immediately. Now I don't have to manage my cloud backups at all. Any new data I save to the NAS will automagically find its way to the cloud. S3 storage only costs $.14 per GB/ month which I feel is a very fair price.

I have a lot of data to backup and I wanted the security of using S3. With Gladinet you can also use any of your free cloud drives as well. Like many people I also have MS Skydrive, DropBox, Box.net, and Google Docs accounts. You can easily connect to all of these and Gladinet will automatically map a network drive letter that aggregates them all. Then you are just a backup job away from adding that extra level of offsite data storage for real piece of mind. I know I feel better. I really like this solution because it is so flexible and inexpensive. I keep all of our data on our Stora NAS device which has redundant mirrored drives. Great idea until you try to use any of the popular tools like Mozy or Carbonite. You have to pay for the business level service to be able to backup network drives. With Gladinet you can backup any network drive to any cloud drive that you chose. I'm not even going to mention how nice it is to have a local drive letter already mapped to the cloud. Ok, I just did, but seriously... Check it out for yourself. I am sure you'll have piece of mind too.

Amazon announces AWS Storage Gateway

I received the following email today from AWS. This is a pretty neat offering that will allow businesses to pretty much add AWS S3 cloud storage on demand. Not to mention the ability to use it for point-in-time backup snapshots. I haven't tried it yet, but I imagine this would also be a secure method of bridging the gap between on-prem and the cloud. Very cool stuff!

Dear Amazon Web Services Customer,

We’re excited to introduce the AWS Storage Gateway, a service that provides a new option to securely upload data to the AWS cloud for scalable, reliable, cost-effective storage.

The AWS Storage Gateway connects an on-premises software appliance with cloud-based storage for seamless integration between on-premises IT environments and AWS storage. The service supports a standard iSCSI interface, enabling you to take advantage of cloud based storage without re-architecting existing applications. The AWS Storage Gateway provides low-latency performance by maintaining data in your on-premises storage hardware while asynchronously uploading data over SSL to AWS, where it is encrypted and securely stored in the Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3).

The AWS Storage Gateway enables you to securely upload your data to the AWS cloud for cost-effective backup, storing point-in-time snapshots of your on-premises application data in Amazon S3 for future recovery. Your data in Amazon S3 is stored as Amazon EBS snapshots, which you can restore on-premises using the AWS Management Console.

The AWS Storage Gateway also makes it easy to leverage the on-demand capacity of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) for additional capacity during peak periods, as a more cost-effective way to run normal enterprise workloads, or for disaster recovery purposes. You can create Amazon EBS volumes from the snapshots you’ve taken using the AWS Storage Gateway, and attach these volumes to your Amazon EC2 compute instances. Once attached, your Amazon EC2 instances will have access to this data to do any processing or computation.

Pricing for the AWS Storage Gateway is $125/month per activated gateway and comes with a 60 day free trial. Snapshot storage pricing starts at only $0.14 per gigabyte per month.

We are excited to share this announcement with you. You can learn more by visiting the AWS Storage Gateway page or joining our Feb 23 webinar.

Sincerely,
The AWS Storage Gateway Team

   If you use more than one of the big cloud storage providers (Free or Pay) such as:

Mezeo Amazon S3 FTP WebDav AT&T Synaptic Storage Internap XIPCloud Storage Google Docs Google Storage EMC Atmos Online Box.net KT ucloud storage Open Stack Nirvanix Peer1 CloudOne Rackspace CloudFiles Windows Azure Windows Live SkyDrive CIFS/SMB Caringo CAStor

 

You really should check out Gladinet. I have been using their free Cloud Desktop client for about a year now and it has been very handy.  Basically it allows you to map a single network drive letter on your PC and access all of your remote cloud storage just like you would access a local drive. At times the free version does seem to have some speed issues and isn't quiet as reliable as good old FTP, but it is so simple to use. The Gladinet team also offers a Pro version that I expect would perform even better. Don't take my word for it...Give it a try.

It's free:http://gladinet.com/p/download_starter_direct.htm

 

I'll be trying out their Cloud Server software soon too so check back for a review on that.

Symform 100GB Free cloud storage. Is it really Free?

Found an interesting offering from Synform today. You can have 100GB of free distibuted cloud storage if you contribute 150GB of local storage space to the cloud. Seems a little more like distibuted storage of the PtP variety to me, but there are obvious benefits to having distributed redundant storage. I need to read more to fully understand how this offering will work, but you can check it out for now: http://www.symform.com/free-cloud-storage.aspx

Amazon cloud outage derails Reddit, Quora | Deep Tech - CNET News

Is there a silver lining? One of the topics I can’t stress enough when talking to my customers about virtualization and cloud computing is the importance of infrastructure planning, monitoring, and capacity planning.  Doing more with less is great! It doesn’t matter if we are talking about an SMB virtualizing their bare metal servers, or a large company with a Public/Private cloud strategy. At the end of the day the computing is being done on some hardware, and the less hardware you have, the more mission critical it becomes.  There are plenty of strategies to mitigate the risks and achieve five 9’s that you can implement if you have control over the infrastructure.  What about this situation with Amazon? We really don’t have anything other than the SLA to fall back on… So maybe you recoup some fees, but is that enough to offset a potential business outage? Oddly, it seems as though it just might be for many EC2 customers.  Just look at the funny 404 messages coming from EC2 customers.  It would seem that they are so happy with Amazon cloud services, that they are taking it in stride.  I remember a few years back when RackSpace had a datacenter problem and everybody was freaking out! I find it really interesting that this Amazon cloud outage is being treated entirely different.  I’m not exactly sure why, but it is quite interesting isn’t it?

Amazon cloud outage derails Reddit, Quora | Deep Tech - CNET News