A year ago, Amazon’s data centers went through a voltage spike that brought down some of their servers, resulting in high profile companies on their cloud (such as Netflix, Instagram, and Pinterest) being unavailable for a while. A few months afterwards, Microsoft’s cloud platform Windows Azure went through a 12-hour outage worldwide.
Of course, both Amazon and Microsoft are large companies with a wealth of resources and manpower, so they were able to recover quickly from the outages. However, the outages prove that no cloud is perfect and that even colossal multinational companies are not exempted from these problems. It can be a very scary thought for small businesses that have neither the budget or the manpower to handle a big outage, which can result in a huge financial and logistical hit.
As expected of problems that are affecting large businesses, it was only a matter of time before a startup comes up with a solution. Enter Nasuni, which is a SIaaS (storage infrastructure as a service) provider that offers cloud-mirroring service to cloud providers. Nasuni’s services add an extra layer of protection via off-site backups of data stored on the cloud, so that even if an outage results in complete loss of data in a company’s servers, they can still recover like nothing ever happened (give or take a certain amount of downtime while the data taken from Nasuni’s backups is restored.)
Some people may dismiss Nasuni’s services as redundant, as companies already have the capability to mirror their own data and create backups on their own. However, Nasuni’s CEO, Andres Rodriguez, believes that you can never have too much data protection as far as cloud storage is concerned.
Nasuni also has something that internal off-site and on-site backups can’t provide: convenience. Since the syncing of backups is done automatically on Nasuni’s ends, IT departments from the client side don’t need to be burdened with the management of the backend, and can focus on other company needs instead of having to worry about yet another data center.
At the end of the day, Nasuni’s benefit is not really the protection of data itself, but the protection of data without incurring any hits in productivity and resources. After all, any company can invest in their own cloud mirroring infrastructure, but with Nasuni, they can enjoy the benefits of realtime cloud mirroring without being bogged down by the extra work it requires.