Our partner for the delivery of our Data Protection Cloud and Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) offerings is Infrascale. Founded in 2011, Infrascale provides comprehensive, cloud-based data protection by delivering industry-leading backup and disaster recovery solutions. Northpoint Consulting has been an Infrascale partner since 2016.

Simply put, the cloud is the Internet— you can think of the cloud as all the systems, applications, files, etc., a user can access remotely over the Internet. When something is said to be “in the cloud”, that means it is stored on Internet servers instead of on the user’s computer’s hard drive.

In the sense generally used to describe its place in the enterprise world, cloud computing is a term for anything that involves delivering hosted services to an individual user or an organization over the Internet. These services are divided into three main categories or types of cloud computing: infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS).

Infrastructure as a Service. IaaS providers, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), supply a virtual server instance and storage, as well as application programming interfaces (APIs) that let users migrate workloads to a virtual machine (VM). Users subscribe to an allocated storage capacity and can start, stop, access and configure the VM and storage as desired. IaaS providers offer a wide range of virtualized and customizable resources for various workload needs. The IaaS cloud model is closest to a remote data center for business users.

Platform as a Service. In the PaaS model, cloud providers host development tools on their infrastructures while removing the need for the client to manage underlying hardware and operating systems. Users access these tools over the internet using APIs, web portals or gateway software. PaaS is used for general software development, and many PaaS providers host the software after has been developed. Common PaaS products include Salesforce’s Lightning Platform, AWS Elastic Beanstalk and Google App Engine.

Software as a Service . SaaS cloud vendors provide their clients with a complete product that is run and managed by the service provider. One common example of a SaaS application is Microsoft 365 for productivity and email services. With a SaaS offering, users do not have to think about how the service is maintained or how the underlying infrastructure is managed. Users only need to think about how they will use that particular software.

Irrespective of the exact type of cloud service, from a commercial perspective, cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of IT resources over the Internet with pay-as-you-go pricing. Instead of buying, owning, and maintaining physical data centers and servers, users access technology services, such as computing power, storage, and databases, on an as-needed basis from a cloud provider.

First, cloud services have the advantage of being efficient. The cloud service represents a solution for many companies. By using this type of solution, you don’t have to spend huge amounts of money on the purchase and maintenance of the equipment. This significantly reduces investment costs. When you choose a cloud service, you don’t need to invest in hardware, facilities and building a data center to grow your business. Everything is done externally, at the partner’s location. 

Want to use cloud services within your company? For customized IT solutions that provide unparalleled peace of mind, contact Northpoint Consulting for personalized service.     

When you choose a cloud service, your provider manages the underlying infrastructure, allowing you to focus on other, more profitable tasks in your business.  

Other benefits of cloud services include:

• Elasticity. Companies can freely scale up as computing needs increase and scale down again as demands decrease. This eliminates the need for massive investments in local infrastructure, which might or might not remain active, possibly leaving some investments stranded.
• Workload resilience. Cloud service providers often implement redundant resources to ensure resilient compute and storage capability and to keep their clients’ important workloads running — often spread across multiple geographic regions.
• Self-service provisioning. End users can spin up compute resources for almost any type of workload on demand. An end user can provision computing capabilities, such as server time and network storage, eliminating the traditional need for IT administrators to provision and manage compute resources.

Ransomware is designed to infect the network rapidly, initiating file encryption in a matter of seconds. Infecting individual files is one thing, but when ransomware infects mission-critical applications and databases, you need a solution that can restore running systems in minutes – not hours or days.

Through our partnership with Infrascale, our approach to helping our clients mitigate this risk is by making it possible for them to Boot up clean virtual machines from either on-premises appliance or Infrascale’s cloud infrastructure in minutes. This can save hours of downtime by getting your applications, production databases, and users online by accessing a virtual production environment. You can quickly browse a disk image to quickly determine the time of infection, and then restore a backup just prior to that point in time.

The worst part of getting infected by ransomware is not knowing whether you can recover from the attack and how much data and productivity will be lost. Sleep better knowing that you can simply and quickly recover from the unexpected using our Infrascale-powered backup solutions.