As TechCrunch notes in the above article, Amazon has a first mover advantage due to the high cost for customers to switch providers.  And according to Bernstein’s research, the majority of businesses they interviewed would not change IaaS providers even for a 20% discount, as switching would bring new risks and added costs in the re-development of tools on the new provider’s API.  So AWS seems to be in a great spot.  But lately, we have started to wonder what the future of the cloud will look like.

James Staten, in his cloud predictions for 2013, thinks that we will stop equating the cloud with AWS.  There are already other players making moves in the market, including Windows Azure, Google’s Compute Engine, Rackspace, Verizon, IBM, HP, etc.  These haven’t yet made much of a dent, but Google recently announced increased investment in its cloud technology and Microsoft slashed its prices showing there are real competitors willing to go head-to-head with Amazon.

A Neovise analyst describes two battles in the IaaS market:  one for basic services such as computing, networking, and storage, and the other for higher-level services such as databases, security, disaster recovery, and running business applications.   The former, he says, is where competitors are starting to grab market share while the latter is where AWS still entirely dominates.

It certainly will be interesting to see where the cloud computing market goes.  New technologies might deflate AWS’s advantages or perhaps the cloud’s exponential growth will prove too big even for Amazon to scale fast enough leaving room for more players.

What do you think?  Will Amazon maintain its leading position, or will companies like Google and Microsoft make a big enough impact to dominate?   Tell us your thoughts in the comments below….

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It’s often hard to keep track of all the “cloud” lingo out there. Today we tackle the hybrid cloud. What is it and why are companies adopting hybrid solutions?

In deciding among a public, private, or hybrid solution, it’s important to understand which benefits of migrating to the cloud your company values most and align your company’s priorities with the advantages of each type of solution.  The public cloud attracts companies because it’s the most cost-effective solution, while the private cloud is popular because it offers the most control.  But for companies that can’t move entirely in one direction or the other, the hybrid cloud can provide the best of both worlds.  Below we describe these three cloud solutions and the advantages of each.

Public Cloud

The public cloud is an off-site solution where your data is stored through the resources of a third party provider. It is the most cost-effective solution, since there are no upfront costs, hardware or need to build anything in-house.  The downside is that your data is beyond your own firewall, so it’s important to assess the reliability and security of vendors.  But since you’re relying on a third party, you can capitalize on their expertise, trained staff, customer service, and the scalability associated with their services.

Private Cloud

The private cloud, on the other hand, is an on-site solution where an organization owns and manages the infrastructure itself but rather than traditional hardware, it is storing data in its own cloud.  The data is within your own firewall and offers the internal data control, but at a higher price, as you still need to pay for hosting, servers, infrastructure, and security.  This solution minimizes third-party risks, but may be less scalable and more expensive.

Hybrid Cloud

The hybrid cloud is a mixture of these two solutions, where lower priority data is stored on the public cloud and more sensitive data is stored in a private cloud.  It allows you to have some information behind your own firewall but also capitalize on the lower cost and convenience of the public cloud.  Businesses can leverage their existing infrastructure to become more efficient.

The hybrid approach can be an excellent way for those hesitant about the cloud to try it out without a full commitment in one direction or the other.  As Rajeev Chawla noted, the advantages of a hybrid cloud extend beyond combining the best of public and private clouds. He credits it with enabling a new generation of solutions superior to hardware and premise-bound predecessors, including cloud migration & integration, cloud cloning, cloud failover, and cloud bursting.

In determining your path to the cloud, consider your organization’s needs – if you need to control 100% of your infrastructure, then the private cloud may be the best solution for your company.  But if you are most interesting in minimizing costs and the convenience of having your data accessible from anywhere, then consider the public cloud.  Or if these solutions both seem attractive but not entirely appropriate, then consider the hybrid cloud for a balance between the two.

By definition, a cloud is hazy, foggy, vague and obscure. And when things are nebulous, our sense of worry heightens. Yet most of the time our fears of the unknown are unjustified, and they limit us more than they help us.

The kinds of fears we hear about the cloud are numerous.  Things like “If I put my data on the cloud, won’t it be open to the public?” to “How is my data safe if it’s in someone else’s possession?” to “Doesn’t Google control all the servers? What if they get struck by a thunderstorm?”.  CloudSuccess wrote a great summary of the unjustified fears commonly held by people considering SaaS applications.  The Top 10 Myths of Cloud Computing they list are:

1. My data is less secure
2. I won’t have full ownership of my data
3. My system won’t perform as well in the cloud
4. I’ll be caught by vendor ‘lock-in’
5. My business is too small for the cloud
6. My business is too big for the cloud
7. Everything on the internet/web is cloud
8. Cloud is cheaper than on-premise
9. Cloud = Virtualization
10. The cloud has more downtime

Just like each of these 10 myths above, many of the concerns we hear about the cloud are actually inaccurate. Security is not necessarily compromised on the cloud, especially for smaller companies that can’t afford enterprise level firewalls and security systems. Information won’t be open to the public, but ownership of data is not much different than when it is on-premise – your data will in most cases still be owned completely by you. Cloud-based apps have reliable connections and show downtimes lower than that of on-premise solutions.  And you can pretty simply migrate to the cloud or away from SaaS applications if you choose.

On the flipside, there is one major cloud-related concern people have that is quite valid. That is the concern of user error – how users can very easily delete, mislabel, misarchive, or override important information. Not taking proper precautions against this can result in accidental or purposeful deletion of important cloud-based data. In fact, 1 in 3 instances of data loss on the cloud are due to user error. Fortunately, there are easy ways (like backing up your cloud data and optimizing your web browser for your SaaS application) to mitigate the risks that are present in the cloud.

Our job at Backupify is to bring some clarity to the cloud and to allow education to alleviate the invalid fears our customers have. We want to show friends that the cloud is not as dangerous as most people think. And if you take proper precautions to secure your information, Google Apps for Business, Salesforce.com, and other cloud-based apps are excellent ways to streamline operations at your company, maximize productivity, and provide your employees with the convenience of accessing their work information from anywhere.

For information on optimizing your web browser for Google Apps security, check out these white papers:

Ten Steps to Optimize Mozilla Firefox for Google Apps Security
8 Steps to Optimize Microsoft Internet Explorer for Google Apps Security
9 Steps to Optimize Google Chrome for Google Apps Security

Sean Lindsay noted last month, “Rigorous data driven approaches seem best suited for finding local maxima, how do you inject innovation and find taller hills to climb?” The answer: wherever data grows your understanding of those you serve. As that understanding grows, it will transform how you think about the processes, products, and services you use to solve problems, whether your own or your customers’.

When I do data mining, I’m trawling for nuggets of data that illuminate how my users and my customers think, and what drives them to behave the way they do. It’s simple enough to say, “86% of our users are on Pinterest,” but the transformative data answers why they’re on Pinterest. That illuminates motivation, which makes for stronger predictions about user behavior. Even data that merely narrows the list of possibilities gives me testable hypotheses.

Say I discover that people who fit my customer profile all read a specific blog. While that knowledge alone may lead me to place ads on that site, it’s more valuable to discover what about that site attracts my people. Knowing that strengthens the mental model I have about my users, and leads me to generate better content, craft a more tailored product, and otherwise serve my customers more effectively.

Where in your company do you have user data, but lack a predictive model of user behavior? That is where data can drive innovation.

Here are some concerns we’ve recently heard about, and ways we can help out.

1) “I can’t restore docs & folders when users permanently deletes them”

BetterCloud surveyed 18,361 Google Apps administrators and found that between 30 percent and over 50 percent of organizations were concerned about restoring Google Apps documents that users deleted.

2) Data Integrity – Ensuring Data Remains Available & True

The CTTA State of the Cloud Channel 2013 study, a joint project of The 2112 Group and Channel Partners magazine, ranked the top 10 concerns that solution providers encounter in cloud sales, and #4 was Data Integrity. Organizations are concerned about data becoming corrupted in the cloud and they worry about the inability for cloud providers to effectively recover their data.

3) Security – Ensuring Information is Safe

This same list ranks Security as the #1 Concern of organizations. The fear of susceptibility to malware, hackers, and cyber-espionage is the #1 reason why companies are objecting to moving to the cloud in the first place.

How Backupify Relieves These Concerns

These three scenarios represent completely valid fears. Losing data is certainly scary, and hackers do exist. Whether it is your users’ fault or an external party’s fault, cloud data can be corrupted or deleted, which is the last thing you want to happen. Fortunately, in each of these three cases, we can help.

Backupify’s core use case is recovering lost data on Google Apps, Salesforce, and other cloud-based apps. Our cloud-to-cloud backup service automatically creates a second copy of all your cloud data every day and allows you to restore any or all of either to your hard drive or directly back to your cloud-based app. So whether your users, the cloud provider itself, or a hacker corrupted or deleted something permanently from your account, you will have what you want when you need it. You can learn about all of Backupify’s cloud backup products here.

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1. CIO’s Guide to Cloud Computing and On-Demand
   Why It’s Great: Appirio is a leader in cloud computing for businesses; its blog targets cloud-centric CIOs. It covers both strategic thinking about the cloud and tactical advice for moving to the cloud.
2. Salesforce CloudBlog
   Why It’s Great: As a dominant player and largely a first-mover in the space, Salesforce’s blog is forward-thinking on where the industry might go. This blog is good for anyone generally interested in cloud computing.
3. CloudAve
   Why It’s Great: CloudAve is a group of cloud evangelists who analyze trends in cloud computing and SaaS and provide tips for users, reviews of new applications, and strategies to increase uptake of SaaS. This blog is meant for general IT managers, or anyone passionate about cloud computing.
4. The Enterprise Cloud
   Why It’s Great: Like most TechRepublic blogs, Enterprise Cloud provides tactical advice about a particular IT subject. In this case, handling both technical and business issues surrounding cloud adoption, deployment and optimization.
5. CSA’s Industry Blog
   Why It’s Great: The Cloud Security Alliance promotes best practices for security assurance in cloud computing. This blog provides direction into security measures and new standards in the industry to keep our data safe.
6. Schneier on Security
   Why It’s Great: Bruce Schneier is a world-renowned security expert and his blog tackles more broad security and surveillance topics.

Got a blog you think deserves to be on our list? Shout it out in the comments section.

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It’s become a truism to say that data is the new gold – but that doesn’t mean there are easy answers about where to store this gold. For now, many corporate customers will hold back on full cloud computing adoption until they’re convinced that they can move their data off a given cloud as easily as they put it there in the first place. Face it: fear of vendor lock-in is not limited to the on-premises IT world and it’s time enlightened vendors get this problem in hand.

While she may not realize it just yet, the solution to this problem is emerging via an unlikely industry – the backup industry.

In the on-premise backup world, which is where most of IT still lives, data backup was just data backup. But as data moves to the cloud, that dynamic changes. Why? Because in the cloud, you don’t always have complete control of your data the way that you do in on-premise application deployments. Replicated data from a cloud-to-cloud backup product like Backupify isn’t just a backup – it’s a secure second copy of your data that is under your control, and that has more advantages than just data recovery.

Take an example and consider a company moving to Google Apps. All that application data is now stored in the cloud and, while Google has very friendly policies around data ownership, many IT administrators don’t feel like they have complete control. Now, assume you have Backupify’s Google Apps backup installed. You now have a secure second copy of your data that is in a separate location, under your control. You can’t be locked-in to Google when you have another copy of your data that is independent of Google Apps.

When we announced our Backupify developer API earlier this year, we weren’t just responding to the need for backup. We were responding to the need for data control. As we start rolling out integrations with dozens of SaaS applications, there will soon come a day when, for every SaaS application you have, you can sleep well knowing you have a secure second copy of that data under your control at Backupify. When you control all of your data, you can move to the cloud with confidence.

The cloud offers many benefits, but they come with a set of costs as well. The data silos that result are difficult to tie together, and the data isn’t always under your control. Backupify has a roadmap to help solve those problems. Cloud-to-cloud backup is really so much more than just backup – it is just a stepping stone to a vision of complete ownership and control of your cloud data.

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As you make the jump into the cloud, you should understand both the value and how to minimize the risks.

Cloud value:

• Decrease labor and infrastructure costs
• Eliminate the lag between business and IT, faster implementation
• Organizational agility
• Scalability as the organization grows/downsizes
• Less capacity constraints

Associated risks:

• Technology failures
• Security breaches
• “Acts of God”

These are similar to the risks faced by companies managing their own infrastructure. The risk aversion comes from determining who would be more capable of quickly reacting to these situations – your internal IT team or a third-party vendor.

An avoidable risk of the cloud is the storage and management of your data in SaaS applications. This data is rarely backed up in a way that protects against user error, malicious deletion, hackers, or application bugs. By using Backupify, you can securely backup your data and store it outside of the cloud application and easily restore information that is compromised.

Moving to the cloud has many challenges.  Backupify can help you move to the cloud with confidence by giving you the peace of mind that your critical business data is backed up in a secure second location. As you develop your cloud strategy, consider your operational needs as well as the various compliance requirements for doing business. Weigh the value of the cloud and do a thorough risk assessment that your company and industry face. Then you can be sure your jump to the cloud is a huge success.

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If you’re migrating users from one Google Apps domain to another, we humbly suggest that Backupify Migrator for Google Apps is where you should start. You can move Gmail, Drive, Calendar and Contacts data with a single function.

If you’re moving a single Outlook mailbox to a Google Apps Gmail account, the Google Apps Migration for Outlook tool is your best bet. This tool snags all your email PST files, all your Outlook calendar data and all your Outlook contacts and drops it into Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Contacts, respectively.

If you’re moving your entire mail server to Google Apps, the Google Apps Migration for Microsoft Exchange tool is your software of choice. Don’t let the name fool you; the Exchange Migration tool can grab PST files from almost any major IMAP server, including Courier, Cyrus, Dovecot, Novell GroupWise, SunMail, Zimbra and even other Google domains.

If you need to move shared mailboxes to Google Apps (and you aren’t afraid of a little basic software development work), the Google Apps Group Migration API can get the job done. The API lets you programmatically translate shared group email inboxes into Google Groups on your Google Apps domain. Your sales department, tech support team and executive committee can still have a shared, common inbox without any of the manual rerouting or migration typically required to recreate this functionality in a Google Apps domain.

The right tool can make your Google Apps migration project immeasurably easier. If we’ve missed any vital tools, please let us know in the comments below.

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The Backupify research team has put together what we consider the ten best guides to Google Apps vs. Office 365, so you can make an educated decision about which platform is best for your company, or if you should skip the cloud altogether and stay on-premise. (Full disclosure: We at Backupify might be a bit partial to Google Apps for Business since we’ve created a third-party application that serves as a Google Apps data backup.)

1. Google Apps vs. Office365: Your Choice from ZDNet. This post by Revevol founder Louis Nages does a great job of digging into the core architectural issues that I.T. departments may be concerned about.

2. This ReadWriteWeb article considers Google Apps vs. Office 365 vs. Zoho, and we chose it because it tries to normalize the three across the standard user dimensions any IT department would use to evaluate the platforms.

3. In Google Apps vs. Office 365: It All Depends, an Interop panel analyzes both suites and provides some thoughts.

4. In Which Should You Use, Lifehacker looks at both apps from a user’s point of view.

5. Microsoft Office 365 vs. Google Apps for Business enlists one of NetworkWorld‘s Microsoft beatwriters to take a quick, high-level comparison of both products.

6. In Google Apps vs. Office365: Top 10 Enterprise Concerns, InformationWeek takes a point by point in-depth view of the issues a large enterprise will face when making this decision. This is one of the more detailed investigations of both applications.

7. In a slightly biased article, the Microsoft professional tradepub RedmondMag highlights user feedback about both Google Apps and Office 365. Take it all witha grain of salt, but any positives about Google Apps that show up here must be impressive if Microsoft loyalists mention them.

8. In this betanews piece, a reseller of both products discusses Google Apps vs Office 365: Which wins over users? It’s a an interesting companion piece to the RedmondMag comparison.

9. In Google Apps v. Office 365: Head-to-head comparison of features, TechRepublic’s Enterprise Cloud blog sets up a downloadable Excel spreadsheet that serves as an analysis tool for determining which suite is best for your company.

10. And finally, we save the best for last. UC Berkeley wrote the most in-depth matrix on Google Apps vs. Office 365 published to date. It is a great place to start if you are evaluating both products.

BONUS: Office 365 vs. Google Apps White Paper. We commissioned our own independent review of both cloud productivity suites and discussed which solution is best for which customers.

Both Google and Microsoft have aggressive roadmaps, and migrating between the two applications is no easy task. So it is important that you make the right decision for your company and stick with it for the next few years. We hope these guides can help.

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Put more simply, can my wife inherit my Gmail account when I die?

This is more than an academic exercise: I have a number of online accounts and services that send primary notifications to my Gmail account. It’s entirely possible my wife may not be able to access my Health Savings Account or Roth IRA in a timely fashion without access to my Gmail account.

The easy answer is to leave credentials to my account in a place my wife knows to find them in the event of my untimely demise. The only problem with that plan is impersonating a Gmail user is a violation of the Gmail terms of service. Google is unlikely to know the impersonation is happening, and unlikely to care in the majority of cases, but on the off chance they find out my wife is logging into my account after my death, they can suspend or terminate the account at their discretion. This more or less obviates the whole reason for giving my wife access in the first place.

Gmail is a service, not a product, and my use of that service is non-transferrable. If I die without giving my wife my Gmail password, the account will be automatically deleted nine months after my date of last login. If I do give her the password, I run the risk of Google deleting the account the second they realize my wife is impersonating me. Google is far from alone in this, and actually has some of the more well considered data privacy and ownership policies out there.

So, is there a way to bequeath my Gmail account to my wife? After a fashion, yes.

First, I can delegate access to my Gmail account. Now, this isn’t necessarily the intended use case for mail delegation; the functionality was designed for someone like a personal assistant or secretary to send, receive and even delete Gmails on my behalf. If I gave delegate access to my wife, she couldn’t change my password, alter my settings or use Gchat or Google Hangouts via my account. I’d also have to establish delegation before I pass away, which means my wife gets secretarial access to my Gmail for a good long time — perhaps decades — before I drop the mortal coil. I trust my wife, so it’s not a problem, but that’s a security hole not everyone is comfortable with. It also requires some forethought and planning. Delegation is one of those “I wish I’d thought of that before” solutions. After I’m gone, it will be too late.

If I haven’t granted delegate access but my wife still needs some of my Gmail data, she can apply for access to the contents of my Gmail account after my death. However, there are some moderately strenuous legal hurdles for her to jump, not least of which is A) having received a message from my Gmail account before, B) a copy of my death certificate and C) a court order showing she’s entitled to the account. And even if she gives all of that, it’s possible Google could deny her request at its discretion.

Now, these are entirely reasonable privacy protections on Google’s part. For all Google knows, my wife may be a suspect in my murder (not that any jury would convict; I will totally have had it coming), and giving her access could muck up a criminal investigation.

Even if my wife gets the contents of my Gmail account, she won’t get the account proper. She won’t be able to send or receive mail from the account, let alone use it to confirm transfer of, say, our automatic bill payments from my account to her own. Again, that’s a perfectly reasonable stance on Google’s part, but it leaves a great gaping use case problem for those of us that employ Google Oauth to access other critical services.

My wife doesn’t care a whit about getting my Gmail correspondence, by and large, but she cares a great deal about the Picasa photos (especially the ones uploaded via Google+ through my Droid smartphone) of our daughters. Eventually, my wife can get hold of those, but it probably won’t be easy and almost certainly won’t be fast (unless she breaks the rules and simply pretends to be me).

And what if I don’t want my wife to get access to my digital data? I obviously wouldn’t bequeath her my password, but she could nonetheless apply for and possibly be granted the contents of my accounts as my legal beneficiary. If she moves quickly (as in, before the nine month deadline is up) she could get all the data I don’t want her to have.

So what’s the answer? Simple: Treat my virtual assets the same as my non-virtual ones.

If I own my data, I can establish its disposition in my will the same as I would my car, my house, my investments and my comic book collection. My online services should have the facilities and the policies to recognize any data bequests and beneficiaries I establish beforehand.

This is a use case in desperate need of address, and not just in the small-scale scenario of my wife outliving me. What happens if I die without giving my business partner rights to my Gmail account (or Google Apps mail account), from which I conduct occasional customer correspondence? What if my business goes under, and a creditor claims our intellectual assets as part of the bankruptcy firesale? An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and online services should have policies and processes in place before I die to establish the chain of ownership of my data.

In the future, we’ll all need to name a digital beneficiary. Online services should offer that nomination today. Most don’t which is why you should maintain a an independent backup of all your online data — including (or especially) a Gmail backup.

UPDATE: This post was originally published on Mar. 1, 2012. It was updated to reflect Gmail delegation and because Halloween is a great time to discuss the afterlife, even for Gmail accounts.

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Lesson #1 – Dreamforce is HUGE

Some reports put Dreamforce attendance at more than 90,000 people, and from what I saw, I believe it. Bear in mind, this isn’t an industry tradeshow; Dreamforce is essentially a user group meeting for one vendor. Of course, this user group meeting has expanded to include not just training sessions but also live bands (including the Red Hot Chili Peppers), parties every night, and hundreds of partners exhibiting in the Expo.

As an AppExchange partner we had a booth at the Expo so I spent most of my time meeting as many of those 90,000 people as I could. Participants came from all sorts of companies (large and small), all over the world (lots of folks from Australia for some reason) and at all stages of Salesforce usage (including “not yet!”). It was a blast.

Lesson #2 – SaaS is Mainstream

Dreamforce is proof that Software as a Service (SaaS) has clearly arrived. The people I met at Dreamforce weren’t early adopters looking for the new new thing, they were everyone. Salesforce makes a big deal about their big brand name customers (Coca Cola, Virgin, etc) – and they should – but I also met small and medium-size companies from all sorts of businesses. One company I talked to makes pre-cast concrete forms. No disrespect to the concrete industry, but this isn’t what one expects when one thinks of cutting-edge IT. When the concrete companies are on SaaS, it’s really arrived.

I left Dreamforce with tired feet, hundreds of new acquaintances, and a new appreciation of how broad the SaaS ecosystem is, as well as an understanding of how quickly that ecosystem is expanding. I can’t wait to see what new solutions and new colleagues I find. If you’re a Salesforce user or partner, see you next November in San Francisco!

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Perhaps the most insidious of these myths is the idea that by moving to the cloud, companies won’t ever have to worry about IT issues ever again. People have somehow gotten into their minds that since their data or their servers or their applications are somewhere else, all their conventional technology issues are magically solved: cloud providers will back up the data, update software, deal with security issues, and so on. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

For every layer of the cloud (Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service or Software-as-a-Service), the limits of the responsibility of the provider are clearly defined. In the case of infrastructure (IaaS), this limit is the hardware environment: the provider will guarantee network and hardware availability, and nothing else. Any other functionality is the sole responsibility of the user. You must set up backup for your servers, define and enforce any security policies, keep the systems updated, and do any other conventional server management task.

On the platform layer (PaaS), their responsibility is expanded: vendors offer a computing platform, roughly equivalent to an operating system, on the cloud. Their responsibility, therefore, goes as far as the functionality they make available. If you’re using a platform’s storage services, they will take responsibility for the availability of the data, replicating it as necessary, as well as for the performance of storage operations, and so on.

Finally, on the software-as-a-service layer (SaaS), vendors will take full responsibility for the entire application environment. This means not only the availability of the application and the underlying data, but also all the necessary infrastructure to make sure that they don’t lose your data, are hacked, or suffer any other issues that compromise your ability to access and operate the software.

On the IaaS layer, it’s easy to see how “no more IT” is only a myth. This is true for all layers, though, because the reasons for IT worries are much less technical than you’d think. Password management, for instance, is fundamental to maintaining the security of an environment; if your users don’t have strong passwords, their accounts are vulnerable to being hijacked and compromised. At the same time, if left to their own devices, many users will simply repeat the username as the password for the account, or use “password” (or “p@ssw0rd”) as their credentials.

Backup is another sensitive area. First, there is the technical side. If you have a Google Apps account, Google probably won’t lose your data (though it’s been known to happen to other providers, such as Microsoft); for some applications, though, “probably” isn’t enough. Having a backup is fundamental in case of disaster. The service provider may go out of business, shut down the service, or simply not take the appropriate care with the data, and no one wants to take that risk. Finally, there is the issue of user error – arguably the leading cause of data loss in the cloud. Users sometimes delete data they shouldn’t have, or didn’t want to. Here, no amount of “cloud” can help. Only a proper backup routine can recover data that was lost this way.

So there we have it: even in the cloud the worries of IT remain the same. If you are moving to the cloud now, or already use cloud services, don’t fall into the trap of forgetting about the conventional IT tasks, such as updating servers, managing passwords and backing up you data. You still need to perform all these tasks, and this is where tools such as Backupify can come in really handy. They make these jobs much easier, reducing the hassle and further delivering on the cost-reduction promises of cloud solutions.

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At Backupify, we’re one of those companies that believes in “eating our own dog food.” We preach that, with a proper backup, there’s no reason you can’t rely on the cloud as your primary data storage system. That’s a fine thing to say if we’re not living up to that standard ourselves, which is why everyone at Backupify uses Google Apps for their business emails and documents, and we all use online storage rather than local hard drives for our business data. (Our CEO was even crazy enough to intentionally delete, then restore, his entire Gmail account, just to prove how much we trust the cloud.)

I’m not afraid to admit that, when I first started working here, the idea of saving data anywhere but my hard drive seemed crazy. Having been at Backupify now for nearly two and a half years, I’ve learned that moving all my data to the cloud — whether it’s photos, contacts, emails or documents — is actually an easy and very convenient way to work. Soon after joining the company back in May 2010, I (reluctantly) moved all my Microsoft Word documents to Google Drive (it was still called Google Docs back then), started using just Gmail as my main email client and started hosting all my photos on sites like Flickr.

So when I say I won’t be upset if my laptop was gone, no, I’m not asking you to come steal my computer. It’s just that I have become so accustomed to using everything in the cloud that even if my computer one day disappeared, I would not lose much of anything in terms of data.

All of my current local computer files are synced on both Google Drive and Dropbox, which allows me to access these files anywhere, even on my phone. Dropbox also works great for me since I have both a personal and work computer. If I start working with a document on one computer, I can easily access it on the second machine. Being a very on-the-go person who does a lot of work while traveling, this is extremely helpful to me.

Then (and this is probably a given) to protect my online data, I use Backupify. I currently back up my Twitter, Facebook, Google Apps, Flickr and Picasa accounts on Backupify. If I ever accidentally delete an email (which I have embarassingly done on occasion), Twitter goes down for an unforeseen amount of time, a friend leaves Facebook and takes their tagged pictures of me with them, etc., I still have access to that data via Backupify.

Backupify actually came into great use for me recently (and saved my bacon) while I was importing files and applications to my new work computer. I had to install a few Gmail accounts in iMail on my new Mac but forgot the passwords. I panicked for about a half second, then realized if I went into my Gmail archives, I could easily find the email to help me reset my password. Simple as that.

I seek simplicity wherever and whenever I can. The cloud (Google Drive, Dropbox and Backupify, specifically) solve this for me. I can rest assured that whenever I am working on something online or offline, it will be saved and secured.

I find total peace of mind that my data will always be available to me, no matter where I am or what device I am using. This is a HUGE relief, because if I was to ever lose a document or online file, my work would be significantly compromised. You can take my computer (please don’t), but you can’t take my data. That’s my personal lesson after two years of living in the cloud.

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• How Mat Honan recovered his data
• Working On The Go
• Modern storage dilemma: The hard drive or the cloud?

Google Drive: How do I sign up?

Users with an existing Google Account can go here to start using Drive immediately. Don’t have a Google Account yet? Go here to create one.

Drive is a cloud storage service offered by Google. ‘Cloud’ is just another word for the Internet and ‘Cloud storage’ means Internet storage; once uploaded to Google Drive, your files are stored on Google’s servers in datacenters throughout the world. This means you are no longer dependent on your computer to get access to your data. Google Drive offers 5GB for free and users can purchase more for a reasonable price:

• 25GB: $2.49/month
• 100GB: $4.99/month

Up to 16TB is available depending on your needs. That’s a lot of space!

We’ll kick off this analysis by taking a look at each Google Drive app in-depth.

The Google Drive Web App

The most common way to access Google Drive is through a web browser. My Google Drive currently looks like this:

One of the things I like best about the interface is that it’s uncluttered. There’s a helpful file type indicator next to each of the files and folders. It’s easy to create folders and drag files into them. Right-click a file and all sorts of options become available:

Open With allows you to open the document with a certain type of app. Google Drive isn’t just a file repository, but also a backend storage subsystem for apps. A full list of apps available for Google Drive can be found in the Google Chrome Web Store. Google Apps integrates directly with Google Drive as well as many third-party applications including video and photo editors and spreadsheet makers.

The Share… option makes it easy to share files and also encourages collaboration via apps, particularly document editing.

One of the most interesting options is Manage Revisions.

Revisions allow you to look at all the previously-stored versions of the document; if you edit a file in Google Apps and save it, the original isn’t overwritten; it’s saved as a version. Google Drive will store up to 100 revisions for 30 days; you can mark them to never be deleted by checking the Do Not Auto Delete box. This could be a lifesaver if you accidentally overwrite a portion of your Master’s thesis!

Most of the other options are self-explanatory – you can of course download a Google Drive document to any local PC. If you have shared the document in Google parlance, you’re the Owner – you can prevent others from downloading it as well.

The Google Drive web app has some other neat features such as the ability to change to a tile view:

This gives you a small preview of the file without having to open or download it – it’s is especially useful if you upload pictures or PDF documents.

Speaking of uploading files – it’s accomplished by clicking the upload button or dragging and dropping files into the web browser itself.

Need to search through your files? That’s what the Google search-like bar is for at the top:

Note that Google Drive’s search is more than intelligent; Google Drive will scan files you upload for keywords, even if they don’t have editable text (PDF documents and scanned images); it can even do image recognition. Upload a picture of the Statue of Liberty – there’s a good chance that image recognition will tag it as such.

The last item we’ll take a look at regarding the Google Drive web app is the ability to create documents and other files (depending on which Google Drive apps you’ve installed, you’ll see more options under the More drop-down option):

In conclusion the Google Drive web app is slick and intuitive. The whole idea is to provide quick access to uploaded documents anywhere. Now let’s take a look at the Google Drive desktop app and see what it can do.

The Google Drive Desktop App

Google says that the full power of Google Drive isn’t experienced until you install the desktop app; let’s take a look. The Google Drive desktop installation process is straightforward.

Google Drive integrates directly into Windows Explorer (we’ll be using Microsoft Windows for these screenshots, but the desktop app is available for Mac OS X as well as mobile devices) which makes it appear as just another location on your computer; there will be a Google Drive folder under your user account in Windows Explorer. You’ll see a list of files in your Google Drive inside:

Files you’re currently storing online in Google Drive will automatically be downloaded and made available locally (we’ll talk about some exceptions regarding Google documents in a minute). Additionally, any folders and files you save here will be synced online. It’s a two-way sync.

Notice that most of my files in the screenshot above are the type *.gdoc; this file extension signifies that this document is a Google document located on the web only (e.g., created in Google Apps – these include text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations); therefore these are just links; double-clicking any *.gdoc file opens it through the Google Drive web app in a web browser. If you want to be able to open the Google Documents files on the local computer for offline use, you can do so by enabling offline viewing. This is done by changing Google Drive’s preferences:

This Google Support link explains how to setup offline Google Drive access; it could be a bit more straightforward but the end result is that you can edit your Google Documents offline (it’s limited to spreadsheets and text documents, unfortunately) using the Google Chrome web browser only.

That said, having a folder on your local computer that automatically syncs with Google Drive online is an extremely powerful tool. Why? For one, there’s the aforementioned revision feature; if you have a Microsoft Word document in your Google Drive folder and you edit and save it multiple times, all of those different revisions are automatically stored and saved in the cloud (the limitations of this feature will be discussed in the next section). Additionally it’s nice not to have to worry about remembering to upload a file to have it available in a place other than home or work. For instance, can create a PowerPoint presentation on your computer and save it to your Google Drive folder; it’s automatically uploaded to Google Drive in the cloud. From there you can share it with your team members. Any changes they make will not only be saved as revisions, but the latest version of that document will be synced back to your computer in the Google Drive folder. The utility is undeniable.

Limitations: Can’t Have One Without the Other

Now that we’ve seen what both apps can do, there are fundamental reasons why it’s necessary to use both the Google Drive web app and the desktop app to get the most out of the service. Simply put, they’re different tools and the limitations of each must be understood to be used effectively. There is little in the way of overlapping functionality. In this section we’ll go over reasons you need both.

Reason #1: You Can’t Edit All of Your Files in the Cloud

While there are lots of apps available for Google Drive, would you rather edit a Photoshop document in a limited web interface or the full-blown Adobe program on your computer? I think the latter. It’s not reasonable to expect any web app in these early stages of the Internet to provide the same functionality as a standalone locally installed program.

Reason #2: Using the Internet Isn’t Always the Solution

The next thing to consider is that an Internet connection isn’t always fast or reliable. In order to be an effective worker, you need both. Even a fast Internet connection might not be enough to handle editing 1080p video online – the bandwidth needs are simply too great, even for the fastest cable connections. Furthermore, there’s the reliability issue. Your home Internet connection might work and be fast 99.9% of the time but that’s almost never the case in public spaces (this coming from someone who travels 50 weeks a year). Editing a document might be a choppy experience and downloading it could take a long time or even get interrupted halfway. Consider these limitations before you start blindly using Google Drive.

Reason #3: File Revisions Aren’t Available in the Desktop App

The file sitting in your local Google Drive folder is the latest version of that file; the revisions (and remember, Google stores up to 100) are only saved in the cloud. In order to use revisions, you have to use the Google Drive web app.

Reason #4: Deleted Files Are Still Available Online

A file is gone off of your computer if it gets deleted out of your local Google Drive folder (intentionally or unintentionally; the latter is what to be concerned about). However, it will still be available in your Trash folder in the Google Drive web app for the next 30 days. (After 30 days, the trash folder will permanently erase the deleted documents and, unless you had a third-party backup, those deleted docs are gone forever. The same is true if you empty the online Google Drive trash folder.) The lesson here is this: store important documents in your Google Drive folder on your computer; that’s the only place where documents are synced.

Reason #5: Google Documents Aren’t Editable Offline

The files in your local Google Drive folder with a *.gdoc extension are Google Documents but they aren’t actually files you can edit on your local computer; they’re just links; double-clicking them will cause them to open in your default web browser via Google Apps. The Google Chrome web browser can be setup to edit a Google document offline (we explained the setup process above), but that’s it. Bottom line: if you create a document using Google Apps, you’ll have to edit it online. Big deal if you don’t create any Google documents, right? Not always; consider the scenario where someone shares a Google document with you – there’s no going around using the Google Drive web app to see it. Google Chrome offline access for documents is limited to text documents and spreadsheets only, so if someone shares a presentation with you, you’re hidebound to use Google Chrome and/or an Internet connection to edit it.

Reason #6: You Can’t Share Documents Through the Desktop App

Sharing is available through the Google Drive web app only; to collaborate on something, use of the web app is essential.

Reason #7: Searching Files is Much More Effective Online

Searching the Google Drive folder on your computer doesn’t make use of Google’s search engine technology; the web app does. Windows’ built-in search is no match; Google search can look through the contents of files and even has experimental image recognition. It’s a far more effective way of searching files. Another bonus is speed; if you have thousands of files, Google will be able to search through them much faster than your computer can.

Conclusion

The primary difference between the Google Drive web app and the desktop app is that they serve separate functions and together make Google Drive more than just storage; combining the features of these two apps makes it a productivity platform.

The functionality provided by the desktop app is primarily file synchronization and backup; files placed in your local Google Drive folder will be synced to the web. It works the other way around too; files uploaded online and shared with you by others will also be synced to the Google Drive folder on your computer for local access (read: offline). The web app provides all the other functions including the ability to access deleted files and file revisions, share files with others, edit Google Documents and other files (check out all the apps available for Google Drive), search your files using Google’s excellent search engine and of course access to your files from anywhere.

Notice I didn’t mention limitations while describing what each app provides because, when used together, there really aren’t any. It’s not possible to fully utilize the features of Google Drive without using both the Google Drive web and desktop apps. How much you use each app will depend on your preferences and intentions; once you understand the limitations of each app, you’ll be able to ensure Google Drive will always work for you – online, offline, or both.

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