Stimulus Tech Talk Podcast: The Advantages of Cloud Computing for Your Business
We've all heard of the cloud and we know our data is stored there, but is that the end of the story? When it comes to protecting your valuable business data cloud security is essential. In this episode of Stimulus Tech Talk, Stimulus Technologies CEO discusses what he loves about cloud computing for business, how to implement a strategy, and how to protect your business from security risks.
Want to learn more about protecting your cloud infrastructure from security threats? Sign up for our free training here.
What is cloud computing for business?
Cloud computing encompasses a range of technologies that provide many different services for business. The needs of each business differ and therefore cloud computing will be different for every business. For example, website hosting could be moved to the cloud as well as email. Other businesses may need to back up large amounts of data or customer information to the cloud.
Cloud computing allows data to be stored in more than one location to allow for faster recovery in the event of a disaster.
What are the security risks of cloud computing?
Cloud services are a logical target for hackers because that is where a lot of sensitive data is stored. Because security is so important, Stimulus Technologies stresses the need for monitoring and establishing a security protocol and training for all employees of a company. Third-party monitoring for security breaches is important because hackers are a threat 24/7.
Listen to the entire podcast for more on cloud security and to discover why Nathan loves cloud computing. You can also watch on YouTube.
Sign up here for our free class on keeping your cloud infrastructure secure.
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Stimulus Tech Talk: The Advantages of Cloud Computing for Your Business transcript (download here)
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Intro
You're listening to Stimulus Tech Talk, a conversation-based podcast created by Stimulus Technologies that covers a range of topics related to business and technology.
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[Sherry Lipp] Welcome to today's episode of Stimulus Tech Talk. I am Sherry Lipp, marketing manager at Stimulus Technologies, and I am here with our CEO, Nathan Whittaker, and we will be talking about cloud computing for business. Welcome, Nathan. [Nathan Whittacre] Hello. How's it going, Sherry? [Sherry] Not too bad today. Excited for this conversation? [Nathan] Absolutely. It's an interesting topic. [Sherry] Yeah. So why don't we start out with kind of saying
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In a nutshell, what is cloud computing for businesses? [Nathan] So I think a lot of people get cloud computing confused or wrong or misunderstood. So it's good that we're talking about it and, you know, cloud computing I think is a term that is more of a marketing term that came out a few years ago that encompasses a range of technologies that are used to provide computing services.
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And a lot of times we we say cloud computing is using other people's hardware to provide services. So, for example, cloud computing could be things like hosting your website with a software as a service company, or it could be, you know, a lot of common companies that are providing cloud services are like Amazon Web services or Microsoft Azure and these are you know, these companies have large data centers, so they have a lot of computing power.
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And you host your website or your database or your applications in these data centers. And so, you know, it's it's basically using hardware that's not dedicated or owned by you to provide services. Now, there are private, private clouds, which is where it gets a little fuzzy that companies create their own private cloud services, that they they host a variety of different web services on this infrastructure.
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And really what it ends up being is a separation between where the hardware is or what the hardware is that's running the services and the server services are running on those hardware. So previously you'd buy a server, put it in a closet or in your in your office and the operating system and all the the services that were running on that were just 1 to 1 between the hardware and the server.
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Now you could run multiple servers on one piece of hardware, or you could have multiple pieces of hardware that are running one or two servers for redundancy. And it just it basically creates this high availability. So hopefully your systems stay up more. So getting a little complicated. And that's I guess it's not so much a nutshell, but it basically is providing more services and a separation of hardware and the services that are being offered.
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[Sherry] Okay. So what what benefits do you think are the greatest for businesses to use cloud computing? [Nathan] Well, there's definitely a lot of services that are being offered by these large companies that that allow allows small business to expand and grow their their technology without having to buy a lot of extra stuff. I think one of the best examples of this is the Microsoft 365.
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You know, ten years ago, 15 years ago, we were hosting email services on servers inside of companies. So, you know, a common system we would sell is the Microsoft Microsoft Small Business Server, which would include email, file services, maybe application hosting, database all in one server. Now, what's happened is we've moved a lot of those things off to Microsoft 365 so that you don't have to buy a server for your email services.
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You're hosting that with Microsoft 365 and it's a subscription model. So if you need to add a new user, you just pay an extra 20 or $25 a month and they have file services, email services and everything that's hosted by Microsoft 365 now. So it allows a subscription model that you can add and remove users with without having to buy new hardware, you know, every 3 to 5 years or increase your hardware size.
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And so that's a that's really what cloud computing does, is you can expand or shrink or change what you're doing on the fly without having to make large capital investments. [Sherry] Okay. So it sounds like it's not too too bad to implement. So what are the things businesses need to take into consideration to think about if they want to implement it and how does it integrate with an existing system?
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[Nathan] So for a lot of our customers, they might have an existing server or servers that are running in their offices and they want to migrate some of their services out to the cloud. Email is a great example, or file services are a great example, but they might have like a line of business application that's still running in their office.
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You know, for example, you know, a lot of CPA firms or dental practices that we work with law firms, they have an application that they want to keep hosting and on a server in their office, but you want to move their email or maybe cloud file services out to Microsoft. 365 So we could integrate those to there is connections that we can make between their server in the office and Microsoft 365 to provide what are called single sign on services so that, you know, they use one username and password to access all their services.
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Definitely, security is a big consideration to take into account Microsoft 365 is a huge target from a security standpoint. So implementing things like two factor authentication, which we which we've talked about in the past and providing backup and services on on that data that's out there too. So there's there's definitely ways to make it integrated with their existing environment, with their workstations.
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And there's just implications that we have to take into account as we do that. [Sherry] What should business owners take into consideration when they're trying to choose the right provider for them? [Nathan] So I think they have to look at what applications and what software they're using in their environment. We sometimes get this request. You know, companies are using an application like QuickBooks and QuickBooks desktop or a line of business applications are still, you know, server client server base and they want to move it all to the cloud.
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So there's specific considerations that they have to take that isn't easy to migrate that data or those services out to about environment. And so really just that analysis of, okay, what what applications are we running? What do we need to keep? And house or working on our existing servers and then what data and things that we can migrate out to.
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You know, for example, Microsoft 365, there's also some limitations. You know, we've had instances where companies have a large dataset of files, you know, hundreds of thousands of files or a lot of very large files that they want to move out to cloud services. And the problem with that is that there are specific limitations that these cloud service providers have.
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So, for example, Microsoft 365, again, because that's a common one, really has about a 300,000 file limit in their OneDrive for business. And so once you get beyond that 300,000 file limit, you start having issues of file synchronization, being able to upload files and things like that. So you have to really take a look at the whole environment and make sure that it makes sense to move up to Microsoft 365 or, you know, Google Apps or whatever it may be, and then the large files, because now you're thinking like if you're working in CAD files or large media files like video or audio, the upload and download of that data could be very slow.
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And so you might still want to work on those in an office environment or in your own file storage on site, and then maybe sync those up to a cloud storage environment for for remote access. [Sherry] So what are the biggest security risks with cloud computing and what steps can businesses take to protect themselves? [Nathan] Well, as I mentioned before, you know, cloud services are under attack constantly.
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So we need to take a look at making sure that UFA a or multifactor authentication is enabled. Complex passwords are enabled in those environments. And then we we recommend having that environment monitored and backed up. So a lot of people believe that just because they've moved to Microsoft 365 or Google Apps that they're taking care of the backups.
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And honestly, those big companies don't care. They don't they don't backup their systems for individual data. You know, they're worried about high availability. So, you know, you can access your data often, but if your data gets erased or you know, your environment gets compromised, there's no default backup system. So we generally recommend having a third party system that's both monitoring the environment for security breaches because that's a common thing.
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And then also cloud to cloud backup services for your for your email infrastructure. And if file infrastructure, you have apps, things like that, that you're doing cloud to cloud backup on to what we call a disparate system. So there's no access between your backup system and the 365 other than the synchronization that allows for the backup, because a hacker, what they'll do is they'll come in and they'll attack one account.
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Hopefully, you know, for them, they get access to that one account and then they'll use that to infiltrate to other accounts in the system. And so monitoring that, if there's any access outside of the U.S., for example, or, you know, brute force attacks on a single account, you know, having that monitoring that protects that account and then blocks that access.
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So there's just a lot of implications because you're running now in you know, in a public environment, in a public cloud infrastructure to make sure that that data is protected, that you're backing it up, your monitoring the access and then you're preventing those security breaches that could happen. [Sherry] Okay. So once they’re, you know, we're there with us as an I.T provider or somebody else.
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So what is the monitoring? What is the process for the monitoring? How is it done? So we use a couple of different applications inside our environment with our Cyber Protect service. One of them is is doing the backups of the data. So the cloud to cloud backups, we do that multiple times a day monitoring. We're looking at, you know, breaches in the account, looking at invalid login attempts, looking at attempts of logging in outside of their service area.
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So, you know, if you suddenly get login attempts from I had one the other day that somebody was trying to log in from Japan and I wasn't traveling to Japan. So looking for, you know, log in attempts outside the normal area where you're working. So there's there's looking at these monitoring events and then we're looking for account takeovers.
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So, you know, and things that happen. So if somebody clicks on a link and puts in their credentials to a hackers website and they get into their 365 environment, they'll often do a lot of things on the account, which we call an account takeover. And so the monitoring services look for those type of changes to account activity and they'll alert our team.
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They'll we actually have a 24 seven SOC that monitors security operations center. So using acronyms without describing what they are. But the security operations center that is monitoring that type of activity and stopping it before it becomes a problem. So because hackers are working 24 hours a day, they're not you know, they're not sleeping at night or they might be in different countries.
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And so these attempts are happening all the time. And these account takeovers often happen, you know, at night when you're sleeping and, you know, having our team monitoring that 24 seven to prevent those type of breaches from happening. [Sherry] All right. Well, let's talk a little bit about like what you know, we're getting a lot of businesses get in the cloud computing for and and that's backups and the and the disaster recovery.
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So what I really like about cloud computing is is it's designed from the ground up to be high availability. So you know, most of you know, Microsoft 365 or Azure or eight of us, they're hosting it in large data centers with redundant power, redundant Internet connections, redundant hardware. So there's just a lot more redundancy in these cloud environments than there would be if there was just a server sitting in your closet at the office.
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[Nathan] So from a disaster recovery standpoint, there's just a lot of protections that are in place by default. What's not in place by default is that backup, like I mentioned before, is that there's not by default, backup of your environment. So whether we're setting up, you know, a microsoft 365 email system or an Azure data environment, what we often do is set up backup to a disparate system, something that's not in the same data center, not in the same region, so that that data is backed up and protected.
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And then there's other things we can do, for example, in Azure is they have different different regions where their data centers are housed. So for example, if we're running your office environment, if you're using Windows virtual desktop or Azure virtual virtual desktop, which is a cloud system, and we're running it into the U.S. West environment, we may replicate that to the U.S. East environment so that if there is a disruption to their data center on the west coast of the US natural disaster or Internet outage or whatever it may be, we can have it backed up in in the Eastern Data Center and bring that environment back up very quickly.
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So we look at we look at that and design these systems for redundancy and then, you know, and then high availability. And that's the great thing about cloud computing is you can move the data pretty much anywhere in that cloud environment and have consistency of of services, whether if there's an outage or a natural disaster, you know, hacking attempt or breach, we can have that backed up and up and running very quickly in a different different data center.
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[Sherry] What would you if somebody is kind of thinking about doing this for their business, what would you tell them? Give, provide the reasons why they probably want to consider it? [Nathan] Well, I think a lot of it has to do with the high availability that we talked about. The other thing I really like about cloud systems or, you know, hosting it in these environments is it is it is subscription based, which means that you are paying monthly for services, but that allows you to increase and decreases your business, changes.
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You have the ability to scale up or scale down very quickly and you don't have these big capital payments to buy hardware or licensing. You're paying that on a monthly basis. Now, you know, maybe the total cost of ownership increases slightly, but as far as maintenance of management of the system, it spreads it out over time and you're always up to date on the latest latest services.
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So we're not talking about, okay, now you're on a 2008 or 2012 server that's sitting in your closet that we have to replace and maybe you don't have a budget for $10,000 this year to replace that server. You know, we're spreading that cost out over over time. And so it's it's easier for the business from a subscription model to, you know, to say, okay, I can afford 100 or $200 a month for these email accounts.
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I and it's just it's more cost effective to the businesses to have that subscription. And you know, as a business grow, you can add users if you have a new location, you're opening up, you don't have to buy new hardware. It's just it's a lot simpler to really to grow and expand and change your business. I think as we're heading into, you know, economic times that are, you know, there's uncertainty and there seems to be always uncertainty and uncertainty in the market.
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You know, it's nice to be able to remove users or add users, depending on the changes in the environment, too. So just a lot of flexibility for businesses, a lot of opportunity to grow and expand more locations. And then if set up right, you know that your email, your applications, your data is always available. And so I think those are the biggest advantages.
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[Sherry] All right. Well, that's definitely a great tool for businesses and great information. Thanks so much, Nathan. [Nathanl Thanks, Sherry. It's always great to be here. Yeah. [Sherry] Yeah. Thanks so much, everybody. And be sure to subscribe and tune into our next broadcast.
