Tech Lover 9

From businesses to educational institutions, increasing numbers of people are utilizing cloud technologies to collaborate more efficiently. According to eWeek, more than three-quarters of surveyed companies are already in the cloud or plan to invest in cloud services in 2013. Organizations of all kinds can easily implement a host of applications to heighten their productivity.

Perhaps no cloud application has the potential to be as ubiquitous as that of Google Apps, with simple to use email, document sharing and more. Rapid adoption has been seen across industries and in educational institutions — over 5 million businesses have made the switch to Google Apps. Yet, the ease with which organizations can transition to Google Apps as their primary business productivity application disguises potential risks, and the fact that IT teams are still on the hook for the business-critical information that passes through it.

IT faces new challenges: the ease of adoption and implementation can be accompanied by complacency around traditional data protection best practices. And, the biggest risk of all is often human error, which causes 75 percent of data loss, according to the IT Policy Compliance Group, PCWorld. While Google has complete disaster recovery capabilities, they are created for Google’s errors, not necessarily for those of individuals or businesses.

IT can face serious challenges brought on by simple human errors that happen when the cloud allows less sophisticated administrators to implement changes. Errors can come in all shapes and sizes. For example, if an organization inadvertently sets arbitrary limits on how long emails are stored, all others will be deleted from the system. Edits to documents can be lost and the wrong calendars can be cleared. One or more of these missteps can cost an organization eons of time and mountains of money.

Backup and recovery solutions are essential to long-term, sustainable business continuity in the cloud.  An example of an enterprise-class data protection and recovery solution is Spanning Backup, one of the top-rated solutions for Google Apps.

The move to the cloud has made it easier to stay connected for the individual employee, but it has become more difficult for the IT team to keep up with an entire business’ data threats all while monitoring the status of their domain. It is truly a 24 hour job — solutions like Spanning’s mobile, Audit Log for Google Apps allows administrators to monitor activity on their Google Apps domain activity on the go. Admins are able to supervise changes in real-time with push notifications.

The days of software residing purely on desktops and local servers is coming to an end. But to be truly successful in the cloud, IT must evaluate key risks and keep complacency from setting in or else a company’s critical information could vanish forever. Cloud  backup and recovery tools like Spanning Backup have the same ease of deployment and can give IT the capability to track domain changes in real-time, allowing them to keep an ever watchful eye on the easy errors that can create cloud havoc.