Can you trust the cloud?
I was speaking with a Carbonite reseller yesterday on the phone who began explaining to me some of the issues he was coming up against when trying to sell online backup to his customers.
One customer recently who wanted to backup his server refused to consider online backup as he didn’t think it was safe to place his data in the cloud. What was really surprising about this was that this person was in his early twenties. So I can only assume he would have done some research and formed this opinion ie it wasn’t just fear of the unknown.
He opted to use an external hard drive instead of an online backup service. We all have an opinion on where the cloud will go and in technology as in most things in life, there are no guarantees just risk mitigation.
Many people who enquire about Carbonite ask about data security. What do we have in place to mitigate the risk of total data loss? The key facts about Carbonite is that it is a very successful growing business that continues to do well financially and has the backing of investors that will see it continue to develop products and grow.
I suspect some of these questions relate to its pricing. $72 is very cheap in Australia to backup an entire PC. What people don’t realise is that Carbonite is an international operation with access to an international audience that has enabled it to reach a critical mass that will support its pricing.
From a technical perspective, Carbonite encrypts your data using ‘blow-fish’ technology whilst the connection is made with the Carbonite servers and whilst the data is being transported. The security used is the same as what banks use. Secondly, the investment in servers and redundancy continues to grow. Data Centre are guarded 24/7. Carbonite uses RAID6 redundant disk arrays – 36 million times more reliable than the hard drive in your computer. Carbonite also has multiple data centres.
What fascinated me about this person’s judgement was that he perceived the risk of a single hard drive failing to be less than that of an organisation like Carbonite that has hundreds of thousands of customers. Its laughable, but its also the barriers that will need to be worn away in Australia that will make more people accept online backup as a replacement to your traditional hard drive. Whilst I would never say don’t backup with a hard drive, given what I have seen of PC and hardware over the years as well as what I have learn’t about Carbonite working here, I always recommend that people use two forms of backup, a local source and one that is offsite.
