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Archiving to the Cloud: A Real-World Example

Monday, May 17th, 2010

Daniel Milburn

By Daniel Milburn

Companies with aggressive growth strategies involving multiple acquisitions are confronted with numerous IT concerns as a result of finalized mergers.

Issues that involve IT infrastructure, data management, and resource consolidation become paramount with quick remedies needed to assure these problems do not negatively impact expansion efforts.

This was exactly the case with KapStone Paper and Packaging Corporation (KapStone) as revenue went from $300M/annually to $1B in just three years. KapStone needed a solution that could accommodate growth trends, reduce storage inefficiencies, improve manageability, lower costs, and provide a roadmap for progress. They found it– in the cloud!

KapStone was able to leverage their existing Enterprise Vault™ investment by choosing Consonus SAFE™ (Secure Archiving for the Enterprise™) to address their IT concerns. A Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) configuration of Symantec Enterprise Vault, SAFE effectively automates the storage, retention, and discovery of unstructured data including email and file systems. Built on a cloud computing infrastructure, data is no longer bound to one physical location or computer.

Without centralized data centers, businesses usually store information on many media, from USB flash drives to laptop hard drives and server clusters. By using SAFE and replicating all data onto a central, efficient data storage infrastructure, costs are reduced, management is simplified, and risk is minimized.

KapStone realized all these benefits and more, including:

An 86% file size reduction in just two weeks
Reduction in backup time
Projected initial ROI within four months
An estimated 280% ROI within three years
Ability to immediately reclaim existing storage
Elimination of outsourced storage costs
Reduced administrative burden
An improvement in overall, system performance
Reduced archive footprint to improve total cost of ownership

Consonus SAFE was able to deliver on the promise of a secure, reliable, and resilient cloud-based solution for file and email archiving. KapStone was so pleased with the results that they are currently reviewing additional strategic solutions that leverage virtualized data storage and management strategies to further improve cost reductions, increase productivity, operational flexibility and responsiveness.

To find out more about SAFE, virtualization technology, and cloud-based solutions provided by Consonus, visits us on the Web at www.Consonus.com.

Five tips on Securing Your Information in the Cloud

Monday, May 10th, 2010

Daniel Milburn

By Daniel Milburn

Cloud computing offers great potential—reduced expenses, decreased administrative overhead, superior performance and availability, and a predictable monthly fee (in most cases). However, there is another side to cloud computing that holds significant business impact but is often not addressed to the fullest extent—information security.

How do you keep your information secure in the cloud? Are you absolutely sure your data is safe? Can you easily access your information when you need to?

As you migrate to the cloud, keep in mind that the security of your information is largely dependent on the expertise and knowledge of your service provider. Here are five factors to consider when assessing a service provider’s information security efforts.

Do the research now so you won’t be left standing in the rain later.

Provider security posture should equal yours.Make sure that your service provider has at least the same level of security processes and technology that you employ. If you deploy third-party auditing, penetration testing, monitoring, intrusion prevention, and other controls required by regulatory bodies, your service provider needs to offer the same level of service.
You should have direct access to data at all times.Discover ahead of time what the procedure will be if your auditors need to get information from your service provider. Can you obtain the service provider’s SAS70 report? How often are they audited? Can your auditors visit the site for their own inspections?
Identify the process for legal discovery. What are your rights in terms of collecting forensic information in the event of a lawsuit? What happens if the service provider’s equipment is seized by law enforcement due to suspected illegal activity by another of the service provider’s customers? Your service provider should be obligated to inform you if a legal discovery subpoena has been issued against your own data or systems.
Know the cross-border regulations for information types.Larger service providers with international locations should disclose their data transfer and storage processes. Depending on the nature of your information, federal, state, or international regulations may dictate where that data is physically located. For example, information pertaining to a minor cannot cross US borders for any reason. In addition, regulations for encryption can vary from country to country.
Know your legal responsibilities. Though your service provider may be responsible for your underlying cloud infrastructure, it is your legal and fiduciary responsibility to ensure that the provider’s solution meets your regulatory requirements.

Public, Private, or Hybrid Cloud? How do you choose?

Monday, May 3rd, 2010

By Daniel Milburn

Daniel Milburn

A Consonus customer, a large information services developer and provider, spent years considering various cloud computing models and their permutations. The customer first examined three of the four cloud computing deployment models — private, community, public, and hybrid — then evaluated four different management options: in-house, hosted, managed, and managed/hosted.

What cloud computing model and management option did they choose? Well, let’s first look at the benefits and challenges of the three cloud models they considered.

Public Clouds

Public clouds offer the ability to avoid large capital expenditures while reducing operating expenses associated with managing a large assortment of compute, storage, data center, and bandwidth resources. However, the public cloud limits flexibility when it comes to security, performance tuning, audit compliance, and service levels.

Private Clouds

As a general rule, private clouds require a substantial capital expenditure which, these days, is hard for most companies to justify. But if you can overcome that obstacle, there are a number of advantages to this model, including flexibility, audit support, security control, performance tuning, plus the ability to allocate resources to higher priority applications thus maximizing the capabilities of your infrastructure. With those benefits come the burden of hiring and staffing storage, network, systems, and data center experts, plus dealing with licensing issues, handling system issues at 2AM, replacing failed components, troubleshooting integration issues, and planning and budgeting for future needs.

Hybrid Clouds

Hybrid models allow you to leverage the advantages of both public and private clouds by placing the more common, less regulated applications and services into the public cloud while keeping legacy, or performance sensitive applications in a federated private cloud. Several service providers offer this kind of functionality.

Back to the customer: Due to capital expenditure challenges, they decided against building a private cloud. And the expense of high-bandwidth (10Gbps+) network connections meant that a public cloud was not viable for their needs. So they opted to go with a hybrid cloud model that enabled them to reduce overhead related to data protection and disaster recovery, yet offered the capacity to deal with their demanding compute and data transfer volumes.

The bottom line is this: The cloud model you choose depends on your business requirements and how you can effectively balance the four main decision drivers: risk, cost, timing and resources. If you are not sure what makes the most sense for your business, contact a service provider like Consonus for help in finding the right solution — one that fits your organization’s unique requirements. The options are there. It’s your choice to make. Choose wisely.

Daniel Milburn brings 20 years of IT solutions experience in the areas of information security, systems architecture, network design, application development, and strategic planning. At Consonus, Daniel has served as Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Hosting and Infrastructure Services since 2007.