Zones Cloud Solutions and our Advanced Solutions Group make it easy

By turning to the cloud for backup and storage, organizations gain rapid and massive scalability at a reduced cost, versus expanding on-premises data center capacity. Cloud storage also offers the advantage of strong protection for data backup, archival and disaster recovery applications.

With your data stored in the cloud, many data center activities are reduced or eliminated. Without the need for manual backups and the associated hardware maintenance and management tasks, your IT staff is free to focus on business-critical tasks, increasing data center efficiency and productivity. And should disaster strike, cloud storage allows IT to restore affected data quickly, enabling your business return to normal operations.

Cloud storage can serve many purposes for organizations. At perhaps its most basic level, the cloud serves as an affordable and secure repository for archiving your critical data while maintaining a high level of security and anywhere/anytime access to it.

Increasingly, organizations are choosing to offload part or all of their storage infrastructure to the cloud to take advantage of scalability and pay-as-you-go pricing. The cloud lets you leverage its virtually infinite scalability to eliminate server sprawl, while enabling big data applications for better, faster decision making and innovation. Similarly, cloud storage allows for more efficient static website hosting by reliably serving traffic and handling unexpected peaks with ease.

Depending on the nature the of data you want to store and the degree of need for ready access to it, there are three types of cloud storage you will want to consider:

• Object Storage is a storage architecture that manages data as discrete units of storage, called objects. It is generally used for automating and streamlining data storage in cloud computing environments.
• Block Storage architecture manages data as blocks within sectors and tracks. It provides low-latency networked storage that is used by databases and other applications. It is generally used with cloud-based servers and applications, rather than as a standalone storage service.
• Cold Storage offers users low cost, high capacity storage for the retention of inactive data that an organization rarely expects to access. As the least expensive storage option, cold storage also has a slower retrieval and response time.

The first step in selecting the right solution for your organization’s data should be a careful survey of existing environment. You’ll want to assess the types and volumes of data resident there, and to understand the impact of such a move on data accessibility going forward.

The Zones Advanced Solutions Group (ASG) can help you assess your organization’s “cloud readiness” using a variety of tools to develop a detailed blueprint of your existing infrastructure as well as the applications and data types running within it.

With that information in hand, you can be confident that the solution you select will be the best choice for your infrastructure, your data, and your business. And when you’re ready, Zones cloud specialists can help your plan and execute your migration to a safe, scalable and cost-effective home for your valuable data.

A Zones account executive can connect you with one of our cloud solution specialists, who can help you run the numbers on the potential savings you could see by moving your data to the cloud. If you do not have an assigned Zones account executive, simply call 800.408.ZONES for assistance.

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Zones Cloud Solutions include these key providers: