Caleb is the director and Dan is the information technology services and client relationship manager.

Caleb started by saying “The most accurate definition for what the cloud is, is your data stored not in one location but multiple disparate locations, and accessible from essentially any device with an internet connection.

“You can then drill down into different types, like public cloud and private cloud. Private cloud is what we do.”

Focusing on what The Business Doctor does, “Private cloud is typically purchased by private organisations who require security, who want to know who have access to their data, who need a guaranteed up-time, guaranteed back-ups and recover-ability.”

www.busdoc.com.au 

There is a perception that if you have your data on servers at your site that “it’s protected and it’s safe, but that’s actually not true.”

Apart from any malicious intent by external parties to compromise or cryptolock it (ransomware), you also need to have backups to recover the data if the hardware fails or gets damaged for any reason.

“What private cloud provides you is the same storage capability as what you would have on site, but in a far more protected manner.”

In terms of best-practice for a cloud provider, “you give your data to a trusted party, they then secure it, they back it up, they protect it against loss or damage, they protect it to a much higher level against security threat or breach, and it should be highly reliable and always available.”

Caleb saw the big turning point for the use of cloud come in when cryptolockers (a type of ransomware that encrypts your emails or files and demands money for the password) became rife in recent years.

One of the best defence mechanisms is frequent backups. “Hospitals lost years worth of data” simply because they didn’t have any recent backups.

“We do a half an hour snapshot. We can roll you back half an hour” so you would only lose a tiny amount of work.

Dan says “That underpins cloud solutions as a whole, and what most cloud providers should be working towards, and that is the relationships you’re having with your clients and your (business) partners is that you off load the cumbersome difficulties that come with information technology.

“Offload that to a (private) cloud provider and you do what you do best in your industry and we’ll look after your systems and do what we do best in ours.”

As for more benefits, Cloud also eliminates the need to leave the computer on at work so as to connect to it in order to work remotely.

Also instead of replacing your own computers every few years, the cloud provider will upgrade theirs, and more often. 

Additionally “You can think of any technological system, it can be put in the cloud and accessed from anywhere.” VOIP phone systems can be, for example.

They have also noticed the downtime, from any issue, was far less with cloud.