5 Questions to answer when building your Cloud strategy

Recently, Gartner provided its view on the 5 questions to answer when building your cloud strategy. In response to this, we thought you would find it useful to hear some of the questions we are asked on this subject at Arkivum, and how we approach this when our customers look to move their long term data management to the cloud.

What are the pros and cons of managing your data, long term, in the cloud?

When data is managed correctly in the cloud it can come with many benefits such as cost savings that can be derived from flexible tiered storage options (e.g. moving the data you don’t need to access frequently into cold storage, etc.) and the ability to handle data sovereignty issues seamlessly. The added security benefits of geo redundancy at scale provides peace of mind for business continuity and disaster recovery.

However, it also comes with risks which need to be considered, especially when data is not managed correctly. Costs can easily spiral out of control from a storage perspective and also from poorly defined access requirements.

Organisations also need to implement ownership and control mechanisms to ensure their compliance and security needs are correctly handled to protect them from unnecessary risks such as cyber crime.

What are the advantages of using cloud providers with Arkivum’s long term data management platform?

Using Arkivum on a public cloud delivers cost saving benefits to our customers and keep costs predictable by providing customers with a service that enables them to calculate data storage and access needs.

We handle all relevant and necessary data processes such as retention management, disposal, security and access controls and long term preservation formatting. Alongside removing the headaches of planning for capacity growth, upgrades and hardware maintenance, the 100% data integrity guarantee means you can rest assured we have your data management needs covered for the long term.

Is a multi-cloud strategy the right solution for long term data management?

That depends. Organisations everywhere deploy different IT architectures across their business to deliver what they believe best suits a blend of important factors; their budgets, business model, risk appetite and so on.

From a long term data management perspective, the focus is on protecting and securely managing data irrespective of its location, be it in a public cloud, private cloud, on-premise or a variation of the three.

In any case, through our cloud agnostic software platform and deployment models, can support single, multi-cloud and hybrid deployments with a primary focus on data protection in the form of data integrity, encryption, a full chain of custody and access control services.

Our customers own and control their data at all times, and we can support customers looking to adopt a cloud strategy by undertaking a controlled, phased approach to collaborative data management in the cloud (single or multi).

How is data security handled on cloud?

By its very nature, cloud is highly susceptible to cyber crime and most of the major cloud providers have introduced robust security technologies and strict access controls to prevent attacks. However, users of cloud platforms still need to be aware of their accountability and not leave everything in the hands of their chosen cloud provider.

A focused security approach should be undertaken to avoid potential vulnerabilities when it comes to securely storing data in the cloud.

Arkivum applies the same data processing mechanisms to ensure data is protected at all stages, regardless of whether the system is deployed on premise, public or private cloud or a hybrid deployment.

Data is protected every step of the way, with granular role-based access controls, chain of custody checks, encryption in transit and at rest and WORM (Write Once Read Many) controls. Additional features include secure exports and sharing mechanisms which support major global compliance mandates related to long term data management and retention requirements.

How can you achieve operational excellence and scale in a multi cloud environment?

Cloud environments can provide excellent operational efficiencies in terms of deployment, management and monitoring of your application stack in a secure, reliable and consistent fashion. A multi-cloud environment provides additional levels of resilience and security for data safeguarding and on top of this, organisations will benefit from well-defined long term data management practices to fully attain operational excellence aligned with their business requirements, achieving cost optimisation and resilient data access services across the organisation.

Click here to read how Princeton University Library is safeguarding and preserving their long term data using a multi-cloud strategy.

Contact us if you would like to discuss how to adopt a cloud based strategy for your long term data.