On Aug. 20 one year ago, the National Hurricane Center assigned the name Irene to the storm that would barrel up the Eastern Seaboard before making landfall eight days later as one of the most destructive in Connecticut history.
If the events precipitated many businesses to give more consideration to cloud computing platforms as a way to access key applications and data from location and device, some businesses remain leery after a major storm in Washington, D.C., knocked out power to some cloud computing services, including one run by Amazon whose customers include Instagram, Netflix and Pinterest.
In a July newsletter, BlumShapiro partner James Clarkson Jr. stated that although cloud computing can offer small businesses significant cost savings, businesses must query cloud computing providers on several fronts, to include security as data travels on the Internet to storage computers, how it is encrypted and backed on those machines, and who has access to the data.
“Although you should address these security issues with the cloud provider before you entrust your data to its servers and applications, they shouldn”™t be a deal breaker,” Clarkson said. “Cloud computing offers small businesses too many benefits to dismiss out of hand. After all, you already met many of these security challenges the first time you connected your network to the Internet.”
This summer, Connecticut Innovations Inc. lured a serial entrepreneur back to Wallingford where he made his fortune with a company sold at the height of the telecom boom a decade ago. Jonathan Reeves”™ newest company is NextCloud, which in July announced the availability of its NextStore service providing high-speed, cloud backup for small businesses or corporations facing the operational and financial challenges of offsite backup, disaster recovery and business continuity. The company established a new datacenter in Wallingford even as Shelton-based Cervalis L.L.C. registered $75 million in funding for its own data center in Norwalk (see story on pg. 1).
“One of the most fascinating things for us when we interview prospective clients is what they say when the subject of security comes up,” said Chris Tella, executive vice president of IT services company UFlexData of Greenwich. We ask where they store (data tapes) and get, ”˜Right there, next to the server”™ or, ”˜Oh, I bring a copy home every night and keep them safe in my garage.”™”
In a survey of some 500 U.S. small businesses published in June, software maker Sage North America said most back up their critical financial data, but the majority perform those backups on site. Atlanta-based Sage added six in 10 of those companies lack a formal emergency or disaster recovery plan.
Answers were split between small businesses that hadn”™t had issues in the past that would require one, those that had not thought about it or those that just did not find a disaster plan important.
The survey did not cover cloud computing.
“Backing up on-site may not be sufficient to protect small businesses from natural disasters ”¦ or more common crises, such as theft or hardware malfunction,” said Connie Certusi, executive vice president and general manager of Sage Small Business Solutions, in a prepared statement. “Data loss could have a serious impact on operations and crisis recovery. The development of a preparedness plan that includes solutions for protecting critical information, such us backing up off-site, could be the difference between getting a business on its way to recovery and worrying about its survival.”
Other findings by Sage included:
Ӣ of those small business owners who back up their financial data, 16 percent are using both on-site and off-site methods to do so;
Ӣ 48 percent of those who back up their financial data do so daily, and 17 percent do so a few times a week; and
”¢ 62 percent of small businesses with a formal emergency or disaster preparedness plan put it in place as a “precautionary measure,” while 24 percent said the nature of their business requires a level of preparedness at all time.
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