Archive for: Cloud Storage
Follow us with RSSAug. 31, 2010
Disaster Recovery Planning and the Nasuni Hurricane Giveaway
Hurricanes sweeping through the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean have already begun to capture headlines. Swimmers and surfers are at risk due to huge waves, but these massive storms pose a significant threat to businesses too. Once they move inland, hurricanes can damage or even destroy offices and company data centers, and potentially cost enterprises tens of thousands of dollars or more. Disaster recovery planning is critical for any enterprise, but for companies in hurricane-vulnerable areas, this is especially true right now. That’s why we have decided to offer the free use of our cloud gateway technology, the Nasuni Filer, to companies in hurricane-prone regions for the duration of the storm season.
Aug. 23, 2010
Strategies for offsite data protection: using snapshots to merge backup and archive in the cloud
People are far more familiar with cloud storage than they think. Hundreds of millions of people regularly store their photos and videos in the cloud. Everytime someone posts a picture to Facebook, Flickr, or any social-networking or photo-sharing site, that photo is stored and protected in the cloud. The file is safely archived. This is a great use case for cloud storage - for reasons I'll detail below - but the cloud can be more than an archive. A snapshot-based cloud gateway can take advantage of the protection model of the cloud to transform its functionality for business.
Aug. 16, 2010
Online Backup Solutions and Cloud Storage Gateways: How Do They Compare?
We’ve dedicated a few posts recently to different disaster recovery solutions, and the strengths and weaknesses of each. Tape, disk or some combination of disk and tape are the most common solutions when it comes to disaster recovery planning, but there are significant downsides to each. One option we haven’t discussed yet in detail, online backup, meets several of the main criteria for effective disaster recovery planning. Online backup is, in a way, the predecessor to the cloud storage gateway. The question is: How do they compare?
Aug. 12, 2010
Disaster Recovery Planning: Is Your Business Doing Enough?
Hurricane season has arrived. Homeowners near the coasts are undoubtedly getting ready to board up their windows and prepare for violent winds and rains, and businesses should be considering the unthinkable too. Losing access to critical data can be crippling for enterprises - in some cases it costs $18,000 per hour. Granted, data center disasters are often far more mundane. Instead of a hurricane, a water pipe might break in the building, or critical software may become corrupted. When it comes to disaster recovery planning, is your business doing enough?
Aug. 10, 2010
Cloud Storage Webinar to Explore Pros and Cons of Leading Disaster Recovery Models
Effective disaster recovery planning is critical for businesses - catastrophic data loss can be crippling. Only 6% of companies that experience major disasters survive, and 51% close up shop within two years, according to researchers at the University of Texas*. Disaster recovery planning is hardly a new concept, but the apparently tried and tested methods do have significant flaws. This Thursday at 12:00 PM EDT, our CEO, storage industry veteran Andres Rodriguez, will be hosting a webinar to explore the pros and cons of the leading disaster recovery models. Andres will help participants understand the disaster recovery tools out there today, and show you how to protect your mission-critical data from potential catastrophes.
Aug. 6, 2010
Simple, Secure Backup and Disaster Recovery Through Cloud Storage
Earlier this week we released our list of five key considerations for disaster planning, highlighting the point that the right cloud storage gateway can deliver where traditional storage falls short. The Nasuni Filer in particular enables fast, reliable, simple, cost-effective, and secure disaster recovery. Many of our customers have signed on with Nasuni because of the backup and DR benefits, and we're going to use this post to demonstrate just how simple it can be, starting with the initial backup process and then jumping ahead to the aftermath of a disaster.
Aug. 3, 2010
Disaster Recovery Planning for Business Data: Top 5 considerations
Disaster Recovery (DR) planning is a major concern for any enterprise. There's always a chance that your business data could be lost due to corrupted software, a hardware failure, human error, or even an actual natural disaster like a hurricane or a flood taking out a data center. So how do you plan to recover? Our storage experts at Nasuni have just released a list of the top five factors any enterprise should evaluate when choosing a strategy - downtime, data integrity, cost, simplicity, and security. We thought we'd sum up the analysis briefly here.
Aug. 2, 2010
The Government Trusts the Cloud – Why Don’t You?
Last week Google announced that it received an important security clearance from the U.S. government. This stamp, the Federal Information Security Management Act certification, means that Google can now start selling its cloud computing applications to government agencies, and potentially challenge Microsoft’s dominance in that market. But the news is also important for the cloud. In effect, it means the U.S. government trusts the cloud. This, in turn, further validates our point that with the right system, the cloud can be safe and secure.
July 29, 2010
The Road to Release – Feature Previews
Here at Nasuni, we’re always adapting and thinking about how we can make our product better. Customer feedback is enormously helpful on this front – every time someone calls tech support, or speaks to a sales representative, we’re parsing that feedback and bringing it back to the engineering group to see what we can do to improve our product and the service we offer.
July 28, 2010
Cloud Storage Security Challenge: Disaster Recovery
A week ago, our first cloud storage challenge officially came to a close and we were happy, but far from surprised, to announce that nobody won the challenge. We then proved that we didn't game the system and revealed the prize file.
July 26, 2010
Cloud Storage Security Challenge: Technical Unveiling
Last Wednesday, our first cloud storage challenge officially ended with an unsurprising result: nobody won the challenge. In this post we'll provide proof that the data was actually online for the challenge and that we didn't game the system. In short, we're going to prove that this was an honest unwinnable challenge.
July 22, 2010
Looking at OpenStack, a Rackspace and NASA Initiative
In case you missed it, there was pretty big news this week coming out of Rackspace - one of our supported cloud storage partners - and NASA. They announced the release and open-sourcing of their cloud backend, now named "OpenStack".
July 21, 2010
Cloud Storage Security Challenge: The Free Software Foundation Wins
Today our first cloud storage challenge officially comes to an end. We're thrilled - but not surprised - to say that no one cracked the Nasuni Filer and revealed the contents of the encrypted prize file, which we left out for anyone to attack. As such, this security challenge successfully demonstrated that modern encryption can protect cloud storage files.
July 20, 2010
Cloud Security Webinar Addresses the Real Security Risks of the Cloud
We hear a lot of concerns about security and the cloud. Security has been a major focus for us from the start, and the security model we chose for the Nasuni Filer mitigates the very real risks of storing data in the cloud for our customers. But for many people, there are still a number of unanswered questions. To address these concerns, our CEO, Andres Rodriguez, will be hosting our first cloud storage webinar this Wednesday at 1:30 PM EDT. Participants will come away with a far better understanding of security in cloud storage - the risks, the challenges, and the potential solutions.
July 16, 2010
Amazon S3’s Enhanced Cloud Storage Security is Nice But Not Good Enough
Amazon announced security improvements for accessing S3 buckets last week, giving customers new ways to share between and restrict access to cloud storage pools. We’re happy to see Amazon and our other cloud storage partners evolving and adding new features. Unfortunately they’re overlooking a core business requirement: user-level access control within an S3 account. Without this, there is no practical way to distribute S3 storage to the employees of an organization.
July 12, 2010
The thing about SaaS: Facebook Security Challenge
It is incumbent upon all cloud vendors to demonstrate that their services are secure. Customer data needs to be protected against malicious hacker attacks or accidental breaches caused by slack internal security protocols. Cloud storage vendors are fortunate in that they can take advantage of modern data encryption. Our security challenge demonstrates that encryption is an effective means of deterring even the most sophisticated hackers.
July 9, 2010
Storage Switzerland Test Drives the Filer
We were all pretty excited to see George Crump’s latest Storage Switzerland article, “Nasuni Product Test Drive – Initial Configuration.” Crump and his team will be trying out the Filer over the next few months, so this will be the first in a series of posts on our technology. In this initial piece, he walks through the basic installation and configuration of the Filer. To quote him with pride:
“As you can see from the video below installation was incredibly simple, possibly the simplest NAS installation we have ever performed. Double clicking on the VMX file started the installation process and after providing the IP address, the filer was up and running and has not been down since.”
June 30, 2010
The Bulk Load Dilemma: Moving Your Data to the Cloud
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.
June 28, 2010
Brilliant, funny, lame and unmentionable: Data Security Challenge Update
Last week we announced the first in our series of Cloud Storage Challenges. We focused this first challenge on security and specifically data encryption because we have repeatedly heard from customers that they are concerned with putting sensitive data in the cloud where it may be leaked.
June 22, 2010
Cloud Storage Challenge: Security
Today we are announcing the first in a series of Cloud Storage Challenges. This first challenge centers on one of the main concerns people have with sending their data to the cloud: security. Businesses that would benefit significantly from using cloud storage are holding back due to fears of data leakage.