Private clouds are now a better option for secure and manageable data retention than in-house storage. That's according to Jayson Dudley, group insfrastructure manager at accountancy firm Mazars.
"It seems a mismatch in someone's knowledge to say ‘we need to keep this in-house' when it's actually safter in the cloud," said Dudley, speaking at Computing's 'The Importance of Archiving' web seminar yesterday.
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"It's a no-brainer as far as I'm concerned; we should switch to a more agile cloud than trying to provide it internally," Dudley continued.
Dudley was particularly complimentary about Google and Microsoft's cloud services, remarking that taking Mazars' UK branch - which is still partly dependent on in-house hosted services - entirely to the cloud has been "on our list for some years now".
"A lot of companies are going down the [Microsoft Office] 365, or Google Enterprise route," said Dudley. "Will the UK go down that route? I hope so. It will reduce the amount of time we spend [dealing with data storage concerns, such as archiving and recovery] at the weekend."
Dudley explained how when he first arrived at Mazars, "nobody had limits on mailboxes".
With Exchange hosted on three servers, totalling 1.4TB of data, constant data compression procedures were required. However, these compression sessions were being consistently cancelled by senior management "for people sending important emails".
After three months of such cancellations, one server became completely choked with uncompressed data. It wasn't long before Dudley decided to move the whole company to Mimecast cloud email management.
Dudley also revealed that, in the 70 countries Mazars operates in, other international offices have already moved to services provided by Google - which he described as "a good company".
"Our French [head office, employing 2,500 people] is also moving away from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Office 365," said Dudley. "They'd rather let someone else deal with the headache of storage."
