Last year Google launched a free service called synchronous replication for Google Apps in order to prevent data loss and provide immediate failover in the event that one of their data centers goes down. This was an important announcement since it means Google now replicates every change made to Google Apps across multiple data-centers in real time.
In fact, for the City of LA, it was so important that it was one of the reasons they ultimately decided to go Google according to a Google Enterprise Blog entitled“Disaster Recovery by Google.”
And that brings me to my point. “Disaster Recovery by Google” is a misnomer and should be called “Disaster Recovery for Google.” There’s no question that leading online providers such as Google, Salesforce.com and Amazon Web Services have world-class disaster recovery capabilities, but the key point, and one that has caused a lot of confusion, is that these procedures are for their disasters, not yours…
Google’s synchronous replication allows Google to recover from a disaster, but does not allow you, the user, to recover from a “personal disaster” such as accidental deletion of data, malicious data corruption, or any other problems that are unfortunately a fact of life.
To make matters worse, bloggers and IT industry publications covered the story using headlines such as “Google adds free cloud ‘backup’ to Apps.” No wonder there is still so much confusion over whether or not you need to backup Google Apps, Gmail, Salesforce and other critical business data stored in the cloud.
And with over 40 million Google Apps users and over 100,000 Salesforce customers, that’s a lot of confusion, not to mention a lot of important data at risk.
So what can you do? Start backing up your online data today. CloudAlly provides the first consolidated online daily backup of Google Apps, Salesforce and more to secure Amazon S3 storage. You receive unlimited storage and unlimited retention of your daily archives so if (or should I say when…) your personal disaster strikes, you can recover your data quickly and with minimal impact to your business.
Visit CloudAlly at /latest, Google Apps Marketplace or Salesforce AppExchange to sign-up for a free 15-day trial and start backing up your critical business data today.
