Protect Against Datacenter Outages with CloudExplorer and StorJ

The DSI CloudExplorer and Storj can be used together to give you a distributed 100% uptime access to your files!   CloudExplorer allows your Staff and team to access that data with the ease of ‘Spreadsheets in the Cloud’. Secure, reliable access to your data stored in the cloud via the different levels of security that CloudExplorer offers.

The year 2021 saw the world make an even bigger push into the Cloud for what we call Enterprise applications as well as plant and operations functionality.

O365 and AWS saw incredible adaptation along with a host of other Cloud providers like Google, IBM, and a host of smaller even more competitive names like Digital Ocean and Linode. Business operation is almost impossible now without these internet services.

Plant floor data along with the Internet of Things(IoT) saw incredible growth. More and more of our lives have a Cloud dependency that makes availability even more valuable than ever.

Q3 and Q4 2021 exposed an Achilles’ Heel that we are all learning to tolerate: Datacenter Outages!

The interesting thing is, we all experienced it together. If you are reading this blog, chances are you were affected by the Microsoft Azure outage and your ability to both send and receive email this past year. Many of the most popular Enterprise networks experienced operational issues when the AWS Virginia Datacenter had issues related to power outages. As a business, when our IT groups and servers were present locally, 100% uptime was demanded and expected from the teams that ran the local data centers. With Cloud, we have had to accept the outages because of the sheer scale and technical complexity that it takes to have these systems stay available.

Have you ever wondered why uptime promised by a Cloud Service is only two decimal places long?

99.99% percent uptime.  Let’s do the math on that:

365 Days a Year * 24 Hours a Day * 60 Minutes  = 525,600 Minutes

525,600 Minutes * 99.99% = 525,547

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Downtime = 53 Minutes a year

So there you have it! The Cloud providers are telling you that a Datacenter will be down no more than 53 minutes a year! Looking back over the last few years, we know that that number is a very difficult number to achieve. By the way, you will very rarely ever see 99.999%. I’ll let you do that math on that one.

So why am I authoring this blog?  Because you don’t need to tolerate any downtime.  That’s right.  With the technologies available today, you can store your enterprise data in the cloud and have 100% availability of your data.

Storj and CloudExplorer - Working Together!

Storj is a decentralized cloud storage solution.  Your files are distributed around the world in different pieces on several different nodes.  Think about that.  No one datacenter can bring you down.  Decentralized apps are making their way into the traditional mainstream applications and are proving to be one of the best features of business critical operation.  If you know your data will always be available, that is one less thing to worry about.

Decentralized Data stored around the world!

DSI’s CloudExplorer Integrates Seamlessly with Storj Files

CloudExplorer already works with Storj!   Using a Solution like Storj gives your data storage read and write capability 100% uptime.  By hosting CloudExplorer in a High Availability system (Multiple hosts spread amongst multiple datacenters) and storing your data with Storj, you approach that 100% uptime of data access.  All with the ease of excel access to that data.

Features of CE are the following:

• Integrates easily to your company domain - both on-premise or off-premise (using our Easy AD technology)
• Install it ‘in the cloud’ - run the application anywhere!
• Security is provided at the application and domain level.  (i.e. Finance can only see Finance forms, Engineering can only see engineering data forms, etc.)
• ‘Spreadsheet’ displays all data.  
• Data Audit Trails for all data modifications
• System Audit Trails for any system configuration changes

Viewing and Modifying the data is just half the story.  If you so choose, advanced features like WebHooks can be used to interact with your company back-end processing system.  

Every customer has a unique and custom solution to handle their business needs.  We developed CloudExplorer with that in mind.  We give our customers a standard front-end to view their cloud data, and they decide how to process it.  CloudExplorer does the rest and you can be sure that the Data Audit Trail is there for you to have peace of mind.

Security - CloudExplorer has You Covered

With data breaches on everyone’s mind, CloudExplorer has you covered.  Out of the box CloudExplorer never allows for anonymous access to any data mapped to its display tables

CloudExplorer has three methods of security that your team can use to gain access to your Cloud data:

• CE Internal User table - Simply add users at the CloudExplorer application level. These users are then managed by the CE System administrator.
• If you are hosting your CE on your corporate network, Active Directory blends right into CE.  Simply add your AD user accounts to the CE User table and your team has access.  
• Easy AD (Active Directory) - Easy AD is a service that allows our customers to run the CloudExplorer on a Windows Server in a cloud service that is not part of your corporate domain, but still allows for authentication to occur on your corporate network!  By using the Secure Shell (SSH) technology from our Easy-AD server, you can now have instant AD authentication of you application residing in any cloud network.  Talk to someone at DSI for a demonstration as to how this technology works.

A super combination giving our customers the most flexibility.

• Uptime - Yes!
• Data Access with ease - Yes!
• Secure, reliable and easy to manage access - Yes!

Contact us here at DSI to get a demo our of Cloud Explorer product!