Columbus offers Data Recovery service

Gartner, Inc. described in a statement issued by Columbus as the world’s leading information technology (IT) research and consulting company, in April this year cited the service, statingt, “By 2018, the number of organisations using DraaS will exceed the number of organisations using traditional, syndicated recovery services.” Columbus said “this is a very significant achievement putting Columbus Business Solutions in a very elite group of ICT providers in the region and globally.”

At a breakfast workshop “Leveraging the Cloud for Disaster Recovery” held at the Carlton Savannah hotel, St Ann’s, Columbus Business Solutions in partnership with Geminare, one of the world’s leading companies in the field of Global Recovery as a Service (RaaS), presented the service to a roomful of prospective subscribers, offering them the opportunity to buy into cloud data storage which the promoters said would be more secure than their own companies could keep their information.

One participant wondered how the company could guarantee the security of anybodys’ data if the data was to be stored on servers outside of Trinidad and Tobago. Marcelo Oliveira, of Geminare, said security is, among other things, a matter of technology, processes, and people. He said his company could guarantee his facility could provide more security for data placed in its storage than most companies because “we need to guarantee the security.” He rejected suggestions that cloud storage of data is not safe, saying that “we invest much more and cloud companies have to invest much more than the companies invest themselves.” In fact, he said most research shows that data security breaches come from within companies, so if the data is stored outside of the company it is more secure than if it is sitting in a company server.

As an example, he said he visited a bank where executives said someone had deleted all the user files. He said the bank did not know who did it and they had no way of restoring the data, so they lost the data and had to input it all manually once again. “If it was sitting outside of the company we would have had to have controls: Who is accessing the data? Who is searching the data? Who did what? We would have to have tracking devices. Honestly, I think that data sitting outside of the company is more secure than the data sitting inside of the company and I can guarantee the security of the data sitting in my cloud.”

Joshua Geist, the Chief Executive of Geminare, described as a career entrepreneur, multi-patent holder, quoted expert, presenter and influencer within the Cloud industry and a recognised innovator of the DraaS market, said the money invested by data service providers far outweighs that invested by individual companies in securing their data.

He added the argument that the cloud is not secure is “so inaccurate when you look at the amount of hacking.” Listing a number of major institutions in the US which recently fell victim to hackers, he said one also had to consider the downtime when there was an incident. He said while for companies the implications of an incident included total loss of data, with the major service providers the downtime was just a matter of hours.

As an example, he said in the case of the US retail giant, Target, which recently fell victim to hackers, the breach had been going on for six months and no one discovered it. He said that if the data was being handled by a major data service provider it would have been their job to know about it. He said Target’s job is to sell merchandise, their job is not data storage, advising companies that it is more cost effective to have a data service provider secure their information rather than tying up endless resources trying to do so for themselves.

He added that there have been almost no security breaches at the large cloud vendors.

To those who may be confused about the relatively new concept of “cloud computing,” Geist and Oliveira explained that the cloud is not the same as the internet. The cloud is an enterprise-grade information technology environment. They said this was different from a consumer-grade cloud such as Google Mail and Dropbox, but Germinare was offering an enterprise-grade IT environment that was automated, secure, remote and self-provisioning in which a user can increase or reduce the amount of storage resource that they wanted.