Question

Use Google to search for online storage services or cloud backup. Look for an article or post that describes available services for remote backups. List two services and locate additional information about each, including how to enroll, costs to use, known security risks or breaches and customer reviews. Find articles that describe how companies are adopting online storage services and locate statistics about how many currently are doing so as well as predictions. Have you ever used an online storage service for backup or data recovery? If so, describe the experience. Submit your findings in a brief 250 word essay. Identify at least one URL used as a research source.

Answer 1

The different online storage services or cloud backup are:
* Amazon Web Services (AWS).
* Microsoft Azure and Microsoft OneDrive
* Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
* Dell EMC.
* IBM.
* ClearDATA.
* Dropbox.
* iCloud.
* IDrive.

There are many other online storage services or cloud backup services and solutions provider companies currently available in the market.

Description of the available services for remote backups:
All these companies or Cloud Service Providers (CSPs), in general, provide the below services separately or all the services as a set.
* They provide the data and file storage services.
* They provide the backup and restore services.
* They provide data lake service.
* The offer data analytics.
* They offer versioning service of the data in the storage accounts.
* They offer data replication, redundancy, failover, high availability services.
* They offer archival services.
* They offer Big Data services.
* They provide data search service in the storage accounts.
* They provide managed backup service, remote backup service, or online backup service through a simple web-based interface.
* They provide a pay-as-you-go pricing model for their storage accounts usages for billing purposes.
* They provide high-security services.
* They provide free encryption for all the customer companies' data and files that are both, at rest and in transit.
* They provide both, manual, automatic, event-based, and scheduled backups.
* They offer, bulk restoration, provide a centralized management console, provide file retention policies, auditing, journaling, fully managed services, they abide by and help their customers do the same with respect to regulatory compliances, server backup, synchronization, off-line backup, data compression, and differential data compression.
* They provide file-by-file restore feature.

List of two services and additional information about each, including how to enroll, costs to use, known security risks or breaches, and customer reviews.

* AWS's Simple Storage Service (S3): The provide a Pay-As-You-Go pricing model for their users so they pay for only the resources or storage memory they use. Any user can sign-up and the first year is free up to a certain limit, exceeding which would make their systems bill the users. The price is cheap or the cheapest currently available in the market and even when compared to any on-premise data center solutions or services. In order for one to enroll, one should have a working credit or debit card for their systems to ensure the card can be charged in case of exceeding the free limits for the first year. There are not many security risks, as they offer the highest, stringent, and strongest security to the infrastructure. However, in case, the users make their data public by mistake or intentionally, the data may be breached and attacked by hackers.

Cost: Their S3 Standard Storage costs:

First 50 TB / Month costs $0.023 per GB,
Further 450 TB / Month costs $0.022 per GB, and
More than 500 TB / Month costs $0.021 per GB.

Risk- you do have control over your data, as the data is stored in their storage devices, not yours. Also, you cannot administer their storage device.

Customer reviews: One of them says, Amazon S3 is affordable, is a multi-purpose means for storing data in the cloud.
Another customer says Amazon S3 is one of the best cloud storage services. It can store any kind of data such as text, pdf, audio, video, etc., and is HIPAA compliant.

* Google Drive storage account service: The first 15 GB of storage memory is free for and all users. Any usages of more than 15GB would require the user to upgrade the subscription for a certain charge. It offers backup and sync services. Anyone with their Google account which has G mail (Email) free service can access and Google Drive account service for cloud storage and backups.

The software could be a bit slow. The price is reasonable. Their Google One service which is for the unified storage service includes Google Drive, 100GB of storage costs $1.99 per month, 200GB- $2.99, and 2 TB- $9.99 per month. It provides the feature to backup and sync one or multiple Google Drive folders. It can link to your Google Photos as well. It is also available as an app for your mobile phone.

Risk- you do have control over your data, as the data is stored in their storage devices, not yours. Also, you cannot administer their storage device.

Customer reviews: One says, you could use Google Drive which has the ability to share documents with your or other teams all over the world. Its file storing capacity is giant. He can save, share, and access files from any device.

Another says, it is flexible to be managed by either an individual or through a joint venture, where both the parties can manage the files in a joint project.

Description of how companies are adopting online storage services and statistics about how many currently are doing so as well as predictions:
Companies are either adopting online storage services or cloud backup as a separate and only solution they subscribe for their business requirements to save, store, backup, retrieve, restore, access, edit, manipulate, process, share, different types of data in audio, video, text files, image files (photos), software, etc.

Also, most companies are simply opting for cloud service or signing up with public cloud service providers (CSPs) such as Amazon Web Services (AWS, Microsoft OneDrive and Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Rackspace, and others. Using these cloud services, the customer companies not only just get online storage services or cloud backup, but also Disaster Recovery (DR) services, compute services, Big Data, Data Lake, Data Analytics, Data search services in their online storage services and other services the CSPs offer.

About the statistics, in general, almost all the companies in the world are using these online storage services or cloud backup services from private companies, small, medium, large companies, start-up companies, freelancers, business owners, and other merchants, home business owners, public sector companies, non-profit organizations, other organizations, different countries' respective governments, respective related government agencies, defence, research institutes and organizations, hospitals (health sector), education sector (such as universities, colleges, and schools, online and other physical training institutes), etc.

These companies are signing up, subscribing creating enterprise or business accounts for themselves, accessing, and using these online storage services or cloud back-ups like any home user, end-user or just any user would. Comp infrastructure rather using their own to save, store, and backup companies, their customer's data in the cloud. They use these services through a web-based interface. They use these services to save copies of their data and files as a backup for later restoration and retrieval. In order to transfer, send, save, and store data and files in large numbers, they use the public CSPs' such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) trucks (vehicle), snowmobile, snowball, which are storage appliances filling them with digital data in Giga, Tera, Peta, and Exabytes of companies and customers' data and they reach the CSPs' premises and the data are transferred to the customers' online storage and cloud backup accounts. Customers also upload their data using their company bandwidth to transfer files and data to their cloud storage and backup accounts.

According to Gartner, it expects 90% of enterprises would use online storage services or cloud backup, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS) by 2022. However, as of now, per certain survey, 29 percent of companies are using online storage services or cloud backup, and about 43 percent more are planning to migrate, at least, a portion of their storage requirements to the cloud in the next few years.

If I have ever used an online storage service for backup or data recovery:
Yes, I have used a few online storage services for backup or data recovery.

Description of the experience:
I have used Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, and other enterprises (office and work-related) storage services and/or data recovery. I still use Google Drive to save, store, access, edit, manipulate, process, share, backup, restore, and retrieve files, such as Microsoft Word documents, PDF files, images or photos, audio, video, and other multimedia files.

The service is pretty good. It is free to use (only to some extent or limit), reliable, highly available, durable, seamless, fast, quick, flexible, the files can be accessed from anywhere, at any time, and on any device. It is positive feedback. The drive is 100% completely a (SaaS) solution, available online on the Internet through the web as well as a mobile application, through a web browser software. The free service provides 15 GB of storage space. The account or subscription can be upgraded to get a much larger storage memory space. You can create files and folders in it. Also, you could use their Google docs, spreadsheets, and presentation slides web application software for free. I personally liked the service. The service is very convenient and easy to use.