I came across this article earlier on the always splendid IT Donut. It quotes Chris Lake, editor-in-chief of E-consultancy, as follows ““Technology is going into the clouds,” he concludes. “A lot of my data is stored not on my desktop or laptop, nor on my company’s servers, but on Basecamp’s servers, or in Google Documents. I think increasingly that’s where we’re going.””

This is a man after our own hearts. We’ve cleared up after a number of clients (and friends and relations, innit always the way?) who have had catastrophic computer failures and lost data stored on their hard drives. The inevitable conversation ensues about back-ups but really this is redundant – why these days bother to store information on a hard drive and manually back that up with all the scope for slips ‘twixt cup and lip when that same data could just have been stored in the cloud in the first place?

I store nothing on my hard drive these days, saving everything directly onto our servers. We advise anyone else to do the same (preferably onto our servers, but other companies do exist). I can’t speak for anyone else, but our servers are secured and protected to the hilt and I have never had one single problem storing or retrieving data. The chances, on the other hand, of my laptop meeting with disaster are huge. That wouldn’t be great, but at least I wouldn’t be worrying about getting to my data.

Obviously, being a company dedicated to delivering a service second to none, we’d suggest using a company that will respond to you swiftly, know who you are and understand the nature of your data and how you use it, rather than going to MegaCorp. We recommend the same for hosting, but if stack ’em high, sell ’em cheap works for you that’s great. If you’re more cautious about dipping a toe into the cloud however and would like some reassurance of how it all works, please drop us a line at info@opensure.net and we’ll be happy to answer your questions.