CLOUD STORAGE
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drive or USB which can be disconnected from the network to create an ‘air gap’ between data and threat. This will provide the most effective protection, and the very best chance of fast recovery of information if other copies are damaged, lost, stolen or unavailable. “Crucially, wherever data is being stored, it should always be encrypted. While this won’t prevent information being stolen, it will render it unreadable to anyone who’s not authorised to access it, keeping it safe and intact.” Future With the growth in data, there is no doubt that the cloud storage market will continue to grow in the coming years. “The cloud storage market will grow as businesses realise the benefits and flexibility it unlocks,” says Will. “In the coming months, we believe more organisations will take the leap and switch to cloud, especially in the current economic and business climate when every decision needs to be weighed carefully and have long-term benefits. “This will mean that providers will be even more laser-focused on creating a better experience and offering competitive solutions, so we expect the market to see significant growth.”
Jon Fielding managing director
apricorn.com
‘consumption’ based cloud storage, you pay for what you use and don’t have to wait for a hard drive to be delivered. The cost to business of this time saving and OPEX rather than CAPEX solution is compelling.” Jon Fielding, managing director of Apricorn adds that resellers should be guiding their customers towards having copies of data stored in multiple locations, on a variety of media. “Relying totally on any one type of storage solution creates a single point of failure – putting the business at risk of losing data in the event of a cyber breach, or if the cloud provider suffers a technical malfunction, for example,” he says. “The time-honoured advice is the ‘3-2- 1 rule’: have at least three copies of data, stored on two different media, one of which is offsite. A multi-layered solution ensures that if one copy is compromised, at least one other will be intact. This enables information to be quickly and fully recovered following a crisis. In particular, it protects against the ransomware threat, meaning the organisation can always restore from a clean data set. “Ideally there should be more than one offsite storage location: one online (the cloud), and one offline, for instance a removable hard
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