One of the questions that businesses have about moving their data to the cloud is how quickly it’s going to get there. Sending terabytes worth of data over the wire can be a slow, expensive process. Yet there are other options, including Amazon’s Import/Export Service, which recently went from beta to full availability. The service lets companies with large data sets snail-mail their files, on hard drives, to Amazon, which then moves the data to the cloud.
This can be faster and cheaper, since you’re not eating up bandwidth, but you’ll have to ask a number of questions after you send your data through the mail. Did all the data get there? Did anyone have access when I sent it? Was everything loaded correctly?
Amazon’s service is more geared toward photos and music and other less secure data. It isn’t necessarily designed for HR records. If you mail sensitive data on a hard drive, that data should be encrypted. Otherwise Amazon employees will have access to your files. You’ll have to trust them not to read those files and, as we’ve said before, no good security strategy should rely on trust.
Now, if you do encrypt on your own, the question is how does the cloud storage provider decrypt that data and load it up to the cloud? If they don’t decrypt it, then you’re going to have a really hard time accessing the encrypted data transparently as a file system. If you do give them the ability to decrypt, you have a key sharing problem on your hands, and a potential security hole.
With the Nasuni Filer, businesses don’t have to worry about that instantaneous burst of bulk data. The Filer gradually pushes files to the cloud storage providers. How fast this happens depends on a number of variables – your connection, how much bandwidth you assign to the Filer, etc. It could take hours, days, even weeks. There is no straight, general answer, but we’re moving toward helping businesses estimate a time frame for getting their data to the cloud. Usually, the time it takes to load data isn’t visible – it happens in the background, frequently at off-hours, and (thanks to the Filer’s cache), the data remains usable throughout.
Still, there are real benefits to a bulk load. The sooner the data can get into the cloud, the sooner there can be an offsite copy, and the sooner you can take advantage of versioning of files. And, of course, a bulk load uses none of your bandwidth. As the saying goes: “Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway.”
For businesses that have loads of data, and can’t wait to get it into the cloud, we’re looking into the possibility of adding a feature to the Filer that would allow a secure version of the snail mail option. We’d give the Filer the ability to output encrypted data in a form that they could download onto a hard drive, then send that drive to Amazon or another cloud storage provider.
Next, the cloud provider would load that encrypted data, without needing to (or even having the ability to) decrypt it. Finally, the user might click a button in the Filer telling the appliance that the data is in the cloud and accessible, and they’d be ready to go.
To be clear, the Filer does not have that capability today. But if this is something that interests you, or you have concerns about the bulk load problem in general, give us a ring at (800) 208-3418.