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Part
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Personal and Business Backup Use Cases - Media Mentions
WunderVu was highlighted within the study to have used B2 Cloud Storage alongside the B2 Fireball data transfer service to achieve their storage goals. WGBH Boston was also highlighted as a media case study, where using HyperStore from Cloudian helped them achieve proper archiving and retrievals. Finally, a personal use case identifying email storage in the case study.
Business Use Case
For Business Continuity (WunderVu)
- Continuity of business refers to the ability of a business to efficiently trounce downtime for the core business operations to continue regardless of impending error or disaster. A few minutes of downtime is capable of posing substantial consequences which may lead to huge costs for many businesses.
- Having a business continuity plan can help guard against business disruption in case of unforeseen events. The objectives include to ensure the health and safety of all personnel, reduce financial loss, the ability to resume critical operations within a time-frame after a disaster, and to forestall or minimize interruptions to the business's ability to provide its services and products.
- To achieve adequate data protection, backup systems need to be established and must follow these certain three rules: regularly backup business data, backup on reliable media or in the cloud, and when using media backups, such backup devices must be kept in a secure, off-site location.
- If losing data will interfere with a business, the basic rule for business data protection is to back it up. By so doing, desktop software programs can be reinstalled when needed, but recovering transactional details and correspondence will be impossible if such files are damaged beyond repair or even lost.
- Business as a service (BaaS) can be applied to a business to easily access the files that facilitate its operations, assisting in reducing prolonged downtime. In a situation where ransomware has infected some files, destroyed due to disaster, or deleted by human error, a copy of such files can still be accessed via an internet connection to cloud provider's backup repositories.
- WunderVu relies on big data as a key component to immersing the resolution of its XR storytelling. According to Aaron Rhodes, executive producer of WunderVu, figuring out the best way to store data assets that will be required to create and complete the next virtual experience is key.
- By utilizing the B2 Cloud Storage and the use of the B2 Fireball data transfer service, Aaron was able to set-up and load all of his accumulated files from his local storage system onto the cloud in a seamless and user-friendly way.
- Currently, all videos by WunderVu are posted at 8k or higher. Achieving this resolution meant that Aaron's team would typically photograph from 2 to 17 cameras at once. The parameters could easily produce 1 to 10 terabytes of digital media.
- Videos are transformed into assets required to create the final virtual experience, while multiple versions of the originals are created and locally stored.
Preventing Data Loss/Archiving (WGBH Boston)
- Saving often is the usual mantra when it comes to data protection from loss but there are unforeseen scenarios where just saving is never an adequate way to prevent loss of data. It can be attributed to accidental file deletion, ransomware attacks, a crashed computer, and even a disaster.
- Data archiving generally refers to long-term storage of data that is not in regular use but can be restored if required. (i.e, data from a former client or finished project).
- After 50 years of content creation by WGBH Boston, it resulted in an enormous archive, most of which was stored on external hard drives or in a tape library, all residing in a large vault at the WGBH studios in Boston.
- The many production teams of the station shared a common archive which strained the IT team’s ability to sustain the pace of the growth rate of take-ins. Creating 4k and 8k media ballooned the capacity demand needed, and the growing pace of media creation added volume of material to be archived.
- New solutions pushed the WGBH IT team to determine that a cloud-only archive solution will be unable to meet their needs, largely due to the requirements of the workflow. Aside from the cost implications, downloading large files from the cloud will be time-consuming.
- The team decided that a hybrid cloud approach would best meet their needs. It is a combination of on-premises storage and public cloud storage. It will combine the immediacy of an on-prem system with the simplicity of cloud-based DR.
- Finally, WGBH’s research led them to object storage — mainly, HyperStore from Cloudian — which offered the requirements in the area of fast access to data, modular and easily-managed growth, limitless capacity, high density, metadata tagging to facilitate search, and low cost.
Personal Use Case
Email Storage
- Making use of web-based email systems such as Outlook.com and Gmail may seem not to pose any threat since all mails are already in the cloud and are controlled by big companies. But such companies are also susceptible to hackers and outages.
- To retrieve those critical messages, occasional back up is necessary. Such back up systems like Google Takeout can be used for Gmail, while third party software products like eM Client, can be used to access both Gmail and Outlook.com running an auto-back up.
- One of the best solutions would be to use Outlook with a service that stores emails on servers. This could be something like Microsoft's own Outlook.com or Gmail, or at a work account on an exchange server or an Internet Messaging Access Protocol (IMAP).
- The process ensures that messages are in the cloud, but also in an Office Outlook Data File (OST), which allows for a separate back up.
Research Strategy
To establish three use cases for both personal versus business back up in the storage industry mentioned in the media, we approached relevant media reports and case studies to gather the information highlighted in our findings.