The CIO of the U.S. Federal Government mandated a cloud-first initiative. For a government body to want all agencies to be cloud based is quite progressive, you have to admit.
The question becomes – if the government of the United States is making cloud a top priority – where does your company fall in?
Usually, we all think of the government as moving extremely slowly and cautiously. If that’s the case, and cloud is something they are just getting onto – you would think that the entire world has moved on to cloud 2.0 by now.
So now the question is – why is your company moving slower than a government? What is holding you back?
Not Joining the Cloud because of Security Concerns?
Most organizations have a primary data center. This may take the form of co-location within a data center provider or sit within one of their own facilities. Ideally, they have also set up a secondary site that replicates data for BC/DR purposes (business continuity, disaster recovery).
Often though, we find that the cost of buying equipment and then running it in a data center is seen as a burdensome cost – so whatever can be done to keep it minimal goes into effect. The result is a ‘good enough’ data center.
Contrast that mindset to that of a cloud service provider, such as yours truly – dinCloud. As a cloud service provider – our livelihood is based on recruiting a customer and retaining a customer. That means, we need to invest in the highest standards for data center facilities and maintenance. At least speaking for ourselves, we have multiple data centers (for BC/DR and geographic options) with multiple layers of physical security. You can read more about these on our cloud security page.
Then we have layers of security on the virtual data center itself. Each virtual data center is part of our built-for-cloud, software-defined architecture. This means that every customer has a private and separate isolated data center – protected by an individual firewall on the front end. Then there are layers of malware protection and intrusion detection and monitoring that take place.
Then of course there are data replication and data center / disaster recovery components built-in with cloud service providers. You should be easily able to add business continuity to your virtual data center, at a fraction of the cost, and on a pay-as-you-go model as compared to keeping two of your own data centers.
You can probably start to get a sense at the level of thought that a cloud service provider must go through. In our eyes at least. Our philosophy at dinCloud is to protect customer data, whether it is in motion (going back and forth from the data center) or at rest (sitting in secure storage within the data center). This along with giving customers the keys, e.g., control through our cloud orchestration platform dinManage should put your mind at ease.
So don’t be shy – move to the cloud – before you lose any competitive edge.
