Architecting cloud information resilience | MIT Technology Review

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Architecting cloud information resilience | MIT Technology Review


For all its aggressive benefits, shifting to the cloud presents distinctive challenges for information resilience. In truth, the qualities of cloud that make it so interesting to companies—scalability, flexibility, and the flexibility to deal with quickly altering information—are the identical ones that make it difficult to make sure the resilience of mission-critical functions and their information within the cloud.

“A widely held misconception is that the durability of the cloud automatically protects your data,” says Rick Underwood, CEO of Clumio, a backup and restoration options supplier. “But a multitude of factors in cloud environments can still reach your data and wipe it out, maliciously encrypt it, or corrupt it.”

Complicating issues is that shifting information to the cloud can result in lowered information visibility, as particular person groups start creating their very own situations and IT groups might not be capable to see and monitor all of the group’s information. “When you make copies of your data for all of these different cloud services, it’s very hard to keep track of where your critical information goes and what needs to be compliant,” says Underwood. The consequence, he provides, is a “Wild West in terms of identifying, monitoring, and gaining overall visibility into your data in the cloud. And if you can’t see your data, you can’t protect it.”

The finish of conventional backup structure

Until lately, many firms relied on conventional backup architectures to guard their information. But the shortcoming of those backup techniques to deal with huge volumes of cloud information—and scale to accommodate explosive information development—is turning into more and more evident, significantly to cloud-native enterprises. In addition to points of information quantity, many conventional backup techniques are ill-equipped to deal with the sheer selection and price of change of at this time’s enterprise information.

In the early days of cloud, Steven Bong, founder and CEO of AuditFile, had problem discovering a backup resolution that would meet his firm’s wants. AuditFile provides audit software program for licensed public accountants (CPAs) and wanted to guard their important and delicate audit work papers. “We had to back up our data somehow,” he says. “Since there weren’t any elegant solutions commercially available, we had a home-grown solution. It was transferring data, backing it up from different buckets, different regions. It was fragile. We were doing it all manually, and that was taking up a lot of time.”

Frederick Gagle, vice chairman of know-how for BioPlus Specialty Pharmacy, notes that backup architectures that weren’t designed for cloud don’t handle the distinctive options and variations of cloud platforms. “A lot of backup solutions,” he says, “started off being on-prem, local data backup solutions. They made some changes so they could work in the cloud, but they weren’t really designed with the cloud in mind, so a lot of features and capabilities aren’t native.”

Underwood agrees, saying, “Companies need a solution that’s natively architected to handle and track millions of data operations per hour. The only way they can accomplish that is by using a cloud-native architecture.”

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This content material was produced by Insights, the customized content material arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial employees.

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