ETG and the Cloud - Your Virtual Valets

Have you ever wondered where the cloud is? We all know about those fluffy shapes in the sky, but when you send your digital data to the cloud, we still refer to the information going “up there”, even though we know the data isn’t just floating around somewhere.

Aaron Smith, ETG Systems Administrator, explains: “The cloud can be a difficult concept to grasp. The cloud is servers not located on your network, nor located in your physical building. The cloud is servers that someone else owns and maintains that are located somewhere else, potentially anywhere in the country.  These servers all work together to provide you a service.  For example, a service such as being able to create and collaborate on a Word document in Microsoft 365. Only the cloud providers (the owners and maintainers of those servers) know where they are. That’s how it’s supposed to be. That's the thing about the cloud. It's supposed to be seamless to you and me.  You let the cloud service provider worry about the servers and network that run the service, allowing you to focus on using that service to create the data and files that help you run your business.”
 
And the cloud is pretty seamless. Aaron says that having servers located in multiple regions is one of the strengths of the cloud. “Picture big, air-conditioned buildings full of servers all over the world.  That's the cloud. If one or many servers go down in a region, the cloud provider will have another server with your data that you can connect to and you shouldn’t experience any loss of service.” Do you know the convenience of handing your car keys over to a valet to park, watch over, and retrieve? Together, ETG and the cloud do the same thing with your data.
 
The system works well, but it’s not perfect. It’s Aaron’s job to consider what happens when it’s not. “The cloud provides resilience for itself, but what happens when your internet service provider faces an outage, or a malicious person gets the username and password to your Microsoft 365 account and wreaks havoc with your data?” That is why ETG offers Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365! With Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365, ETG copies all of that important data from Microsoft’s cloud to ETG’s backup server in their building and a separate copy to a trusted cloud storage provider.  “We will not only backup your email, Word documents and Excel spreadsheets, but your SharePoint Online website and Teams messages too.”
 
In the end, all it takes is one. One hacker. One accidental click or key stroke that results in lost data. If you’ve given your keys to the valet, all you have to do is present your claim check or, in this case, call Aaron, and he can recover it. “If a client has data loss, they call us and I can help them recover from it. We regularly get customers calling, saying ‘hey, we've lost this or that file. The file got accidentally deleted and it would regularly be in the backup’. So, I go and look at the backup and recover it for them.”
 
Not surprisingly, it’s not only large enterprises and Fortune 500 companies that rely on the cloud for business services and benefit from data safety. Every small to mid-sized company does, too, and these are the ones that tend to rely the most on cloud business services, but give the safety of their data in these services the least attention. With ETG’s Veeam powered backup services however, these small to mid-sized companies don’t have to worry about the safety of their cloud-based data. When disaster strikes, they can call someone they know - a human being. They can call Aaron Smith.
 
Besides being a systems administrator, Aaron Smith is also a 2022 Veeam certified architect and Veeam certified engineer.  He would be happy to answer any of your backup related concerns.
 
ETG is a licensed service provider for Veeam and because they are, you have the advantage of getting the best data security in the business serviced by ETG, a local firm you know and trust.