What’s tougher than your firewall? The Cloud!
By now, you’ve all heard about the cloud model of computing, but you may have assumed that it’s appropriate only for the largest organizations. That’s not so … and when access to the cloud is acquired as a service, it can provide even small companies better security than traditional in-house solutions, yet at a fraction of the cost. So why do you need it?
We’ve all come to depend on email as an important tool in doing our work. But with the average worker spending over two hours a day writing and responding to email – to say nothing of the volume of information that’s moved along with it – the storage and bandwidth requirements are imposing.
Keeping that information secure, and archiving it all responsibly, can eat up a lot of time for an in-house staff, and keep them from work that can generate competitive advantage.
Security is the biggest consideration
Consider that the vast majority of email crisscrossing the web is spam. On top of that, even small organizations receive viruses, worms, and Trojan horses each day. And though malware may be a smaller threat, it’s no less insidious, because it can live on your network for weeks or months before it’s detected. And if that’s not enough – social networking threats are growing every day.
Your in-house anti-virus and anti-spam programs, even if effective, solve only part of the problem, because spam and viruses require remediation, and eat up storage and bandwidth. And as each day goes by, the threats become more numerous and sophisticated, so the situation will only get worse.
The second benefit is archiving
Heavily-regulated industries, such as financial services, energy and healthcare have made a practice of archiving for a while now, simple because they must be able to recover and produce email evidence in legal discovery proceedings. Now, other businesses are embracing it, too, for different reasons.
Archiving involves more than your regular backup, which is just a snapshot of content on your server. Archiving captures all email, and gives you a strategic, searchable asset. Even if you’re not regulated, and never need to produce discovery documents, a well-managed archive can be an efficient storage tool, and give you access to key information that serves as your vital “corporate memory.” It can also serve as a readily available disaster recovery tool if your primary email system is disrupted.
Your time in the cloud has come
While cloud-based security won’t solve every IT challenge we face, it has important benefits you should consider.
Lower, more predictable costs. You’ll need fewer in-house IT people, and upgrades are absorbed by the providers.
More productivity for IT staff. By freeing them up from solving problems, your staff will be available for initiatives and tasks that provide more value to your organization.
Very high detection and reliability. Cloud-based solutions can give you a level of protection that even large organizations can’t afford. And with multiple data centers with backup power sources and other redundancies, up-time for providers is typically much higher than in-house solutions.
Better security. Leading providers give you extraordinarily high levels of physical and logical data security.
Faster deployment. Rather than acquiring and installing on-premise systems, cloud-based security is quick and easy to adopt.
More flexible access. Higher security often means less productive employees. But with a cloud-based solution, users can safely do their work from home and from mobile devices. The cloud eliminates threats before they ever reach your network.
Want to learn more?
If you’re struggling with rising IT costs and increasing security threats, a cloud-based solution is worth investigation. It can reduce threats to your data, reduce your total cost of ownership, allow you to put IT people on more important work, and make IT costs more predictable.
Entec can introduce you to a number of different options, suitable for any size organization, and show you how to make your business more safe and more productive. Give us a call and we’ll be happy to show you.