Every day businesses are changing the way they deliver applications to their users. Applications traditionally delivered on-premises are increasingly taken as a service from Software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers such as Microsoft.
It is estimated that the use of SaaS software will grow at a rate roughly 5 x that of On-premises solutions. Now you’re probably thinking these are just marketing figures, but in my experience over the last year, the conversations I am having with businesses show that there is a real interest and push towards SaaS both for functionality and commercial reasons. The most prominent of these SaaS solutions is Office 365. Businesses are deploying O365 to provide email and collaboration services to their users. However, there has been one worrying aspect of SaaS deployments that I have noticed and that is the risks that come with putting your data in the cloud. We know public cloud providers have robust disaster recovery capabilities with multiple data centre and replications but native backup is something some providers lack and it’s assumed in most cases that this included as part of the SaaS service you are paying for. It often comes as a shock when we find out that in some cases it isn’t and the next questions that always follows are “how can I backup my data?” There are a number of tools in the market that can provide the ability to backup your email from Office 365 but what about your other applications and what happens if you don’t have somewhere to back it up too.
That’s where NetApp can help with their new Cloud Control software
Cloud Control provides business with the ability to backup and protects their cloud based data. It gives businesses the unique tools to be able to take the data they have within O365 and back it up to a secondary location. One of the key things for me is that this provides a business with flexibility and choice. Cloud Control provides you with multiple deployment scenarios today. Back up your Office 365 data to the Cloud Control storage as part of your solution created and managed by Cloud Control, this is an AWS S3 which provides cloud-to-cloud backup. Bring your own license and back up your Office 365 data to your AWS S3 storage or you can use StorageGrid Web scale solutions as the backup target, which provides cloud-to-cloud backup whether that be public or private. Cloud Control is a full SaaS application there is no need for agents to be deployed, no software to install and no infrastructure required, making it easy to deploy and manage. But Cloud Control doesn’t just help you protect your data through backups, it also provides multiple layers of operational and physical security.
Strong encryption:
Cloud Control protects data at rest with 256-bit AES object-level encryption with the unique encryption key. All data in transit is also protected with Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption.
Intrusion detection:
Cloud Control environment constantly guards against intrusion with real-time monitoring, detection, and alerting.
Controlled access:
Access to a production environment is granted only to a dedicated operations team who has specific operational requirements. Changes to the production environment are tracked and audited. In summary to me, Cloud Control can provide a flexible, Secure, efficient and cost effective solution for your SaaS applications. If you’d like to learn more about NetApp Cloud control or see it in action please call one of our experts on 03331 300600 or email groupsales@tctg.co.uk.
Author: Mark Carlton, Group Technical Services Manager.