IT environments that can’t provide reliable, consistent availability risk driving users to unauthorised cloud services — and compromising security in the process, according to Warren Oliver, Veeam’s regional manager for Southern Africa.
“The consumerisation of the past decade has dramatically changed user perspectives on IT,” says Olivier. “Many people are now comfortable using cloud-based email, storage and file sharing services — and if their own IT departments provide a service that’s slower, less convenient or less reliable, they will find a way to work around the rules. In the new always-on business world, contemporary users have very low tolerance for downtime, and that may put compliance at risk.”
Olivier says any availability gap will tend to push users toward finding their own solutions. “Discussions about availability tend to focus on disaster recovery, but true disasters are rare. The real availability threats are far more common things like low system performance or service degradation, accidentally deleted files that can’t be recovered easily, or processes that get stuck because a key person is out of the office. These are the daily frustrations that create availability gaps between what users demand and what systems can deliver.”
“If you really want to stop your staff using insecure third-party cloud services to share company files, simply making a rule against it isn’t going to work,” says Olivier. “You have to avoid the problems that send them elsewhere in the first place. That means your environment needs to be designed and managed for maximum availability, which may include providing similar services in-house. Fortunately this is precisely what virtualisation enables: With the right tools in place, nothing except the kind of disaster that takes out whole cities should knock your systems out.”
Olivier says tools like the Veeam Availability Suite, which are designed for modern data centres, combine the basic protection of old-fashioned backup with more sophisticated capabilities for verified recovery, replication, and high speed recovery of individual files and servers as well as entire environments. “A virtualised server is just a file like any other, and can be storied, copied and moved around like any other. A replica server can be spun up in minutes, and individual files can be recovered in seconds. This makes it much easier to provide highly available systems.”
Where user demand for cloud services is already entrenched, adds Olivier, “there are now also ways to meet that demand without breaking policy. For example, locally based services like First for Cloud provide direct user access to popular tools like Dropbox, but within a secure enterprise environment. We have only begun to tap the potential of the cloud to deliver both flexibility and security.”
