Those seeking to adopt cloud solutions should not neglect data protection and security.

With the acceleration of digital transformation largely due to the COVID-19 pandemic, most organisations have had to adopt technologies such as cloud computing at an accelerated pace to ensure business continuity and enable employees to work remotely.

While this trend has highlighted the significant benefits of digitisation for businesses, it has also effectively underscored the importance of both Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) like Microsoft Office 365 for example. It has accelerated its uptake as a mechanism for organisations to procure technology through operating expense (opex) as opposed to capital expense (capex).

At the same time, it’s important to note that this can be a massive transition for organisations that are considering adopting IaaS or SaaS. It may not be every NZ organisation’s preferred choice, largely due to data sovereignty concerns that could lead to resistance to moving sensitive information into a public cloud – and this is where vBridge IaaS is the perfect choice for non-SaaS workloads as our datacentres are all within New Zealand boarders.

So then, who’s responsible for data protection you may ask?

Organisations often neglect to consider that while cloud vendors provide offsite infrastructure or services, they rarely take responsibility for protecting a company’s data. Well, again, this is where vBridge is different. We do genuinely care about protecting our customers data.

We have a comprehensive Veeam backup solution as part of our IaaS offering, backed by a top notch OPS team. We manage and maintain this infrastructure to make sure that backups are run and complete successfully. Customers with IaaS workloads can enable, disable and change backup type as well as see the status of their backups through our award-winning cloud portal, MyCloudSpace.

The responsibility is ultimately on the customer to enable these backup jobs when they deploy new workloads, however they have the ability to opt in on an “unprotected vm” report so if a few have been missed, they can see what workloads are not protected and take action against this.

Veeam backup for Office 365 is also a service we offer, where all O365 backup data is stored locally in New Zealand and not in some US or European datacentre.

Underpinning all of this is that we are a certified ISO 27001 organisation. We also employ an Information Security Management System (ISMS) to ensure that we are protecting both our own and, more importantly, our customers’ systems and data that we support on our platforms.