Cloud technology is well worth adopting to boost your business. It eliminates costly physical storage space for your data, frees up your document movement and allows you keep all your interested parties in the data loop with no delays.
It also allows you to stay flexible, supporting a more mobile workforce, while automatic software updates make sure you are never lagging behind. It's also more sustainable, cutting down on your usage of consumables such as paper and toner, which is good news for the environment and your budget.
There are, however, certain things you have to keep in mind before you commit completely to cloud services. Here are three all-important tips to follow.
You still have to back up
Regardless of what kind of company you run and what kind of data you are storing, it must be backed up and backed up again. Cloud services are reliable but that does not make them infallible. Not only should you be backing up your data as often as possible, you should be testing your back ups too.
In terms of back up locations, ensure that these are stored in different locations than the data source.
Your web server will go down one day
Do not assume your web server will never fail you. In fact, keep in mind that it is an inevitability of running an IT network that it will go down and probably more than once. It's never a good thing when this happens but it can be a somewhat less debilitating and disastrous thing if you have planned for the worst ahead of time.
Use a number of different data locations (known as availability zones) and even the worst server failure will not set you too far back. The more regions your information is saved in the better.
Double up on cloud services
Obviously this will depend on what you can afford, but it's a very good plan to add more than one cloud provider to your infrastructure. This means even more tools to help you regain your data if one service goes down.