The answer is a resounding “Yes!!” Cloud services are on the rise and we here at Colden Company have been touting the cloud for specific business cases for some time. Cloud computing is not a temporary fad; it is computing model that is here to stay because it offers value. If your business is using cloud services for some or all of your business architecture, backups are still an important conversation to have. While your business may have transferred the risk of performing backups to your cloud vendor, it is vitally important to know the specifics of the backups your vendor is making for you and evaluate whether or not those backups are sufficient for your business.
Let’s take Office 365 as an example. This is Microsoft’s cloud productivity platform that Colden Company has been discussing with and migrating our clients to. Microsoft has done a good job of creating a stable, widely available infrastructure for your corporate email. If you are using Office 365 and delete an email, can you recover it? For how long can it be recovered? How do you go about recovering it? These are all important questions that must be considered when evaluating your Office 365 implementation. By default, Microsoft will allow you to recover an email for up to 30 days using their support phone line. What if you have a long-running construction job and you need email history for the term of the job? What if your organization is subject to legal hold for email compliance? What if your organization just wants to the ability to recover more email or have a complete email history for the protection of your business? There are solutions to these problems.
Colden Company can provide your business with cloud backup solutions. This service is not limited to Office 365; it also covers Google G Suite (formerly Google Apps) as well as backup options for other cloud services like Salesforce.com. We can provide archiving solutions in addition to backup options. Note that email archiving is very different than backup. True archiving will keep copies of all incoming and outgoing email regardless of whether or not an email was deleted by a user. It is an important option for those businesses needing retention and legal hold compliance for email. Archiving is also available for on-premise Exchange or Hosted Exchange solutions as well.
Cloud backup and archiving are solutions that do not get a lot of attention… until you need it. In fact, most of our customers utilizing these services are businesses that signed up because they had a business situation where they needed it and did not have it. It is comparable to preparing for the storm the day after it passes. Don’t find yourself in the same situation! Backup and archiving options are affordable and invaluable when you need them.
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