Cloud Storage Providers…Boon or a Predicament?

The technological world has progressed by leaps and bounds and this has made computing more fun and troublesome at the same time. Storage space was once limited to some megabytes now ranges in terabytes which also proves insufficient sometimes. The increasing mobilization has increased the requirements of mobile applications and features which can be used on the go.

Cloud storage, is one of the increasing trends of mobile storage. Data is stored in remote servers over the internet and can be accessed from virtually anywhere in the world with the right username and password. This has made file sharing and backup a piece of cake. People now need not worry about buying storage space and can easily enjoy these services which offer certain free packages too.

With its growing awareness among the users, it has gained a lot of attraction. Now many users and even companies store their data securely on cloud services in order to take advantage of the freedom to access data from anywhere. But as is the drawback of every technology, this cloud service too has its downsides, which should be addressed first in order to avoid future problems and inconveniences.

Firstly, as uploading and storing data on cloud services would mean relying on a third party entirely for our data storage needs, and if any problem hits that service provider, we are in trouble too. This problem is not as simple as it sounds; many companies have faced severe consequences of their cloud storage service provider going down for a couple of days only.

How to cope with this situation

Companies need to be prepared for such outages and have necessary precautions in place to be able to survive and fight through any such time which may come. Firstly, Backups should be kept locally of the data stored on cloud services, as a company cannot afford losing it all in case of any problem. It needs to have a regular backup routine so to keep both the file versions in sync and minimize the possible data losses.

Another step that should be taken is to prepare the staff of the company for such difficult times to cope up with the situation. This is possible through theoretical knowledge and practical implementation. Regular drills can be planned and performed so as to keep the staff in practice of their task once such a situation builds up.

Experts have always had an opinion, that relying on one service provider for any kind of work, which is important, is madness. There should be alternate cloud service based storage ready to take over if one fails. The important point here is to build the system in such a way that it can seamlessly transfer over to the new service without degrading performance.

Tackling Downtime

Lastly, consumers are the asset for the company and they should be kept pleased in order for the company to run. It is a widely accepted behavior that once the consumers are kept informed about certain breakdown of service, they tend to be much more patient as there is hope that the service will recover soon.