The Cloud?

I'm not gonna lie... this is a pretty cool concept.

Over the past two months, we've noticed our computers experiencing EXTREME declines in performance. The sign industry is littered with graphic design components, and the number of design files, with using Adobe or Flexi programs, is literally in the tens of thousands. The size of each graphic design file generally ranges anywhere from 5 megabytes to 2 gigabytes. Multiply that time not only thousands of files, but when accounting for duplicated copies due to transferring file formats or prepping them for production, the volume used on a hard drive is pretty incredible. Thus, capacity has nearly been maxed out on a couple of 500GB hard drives. We thought it would be beneficial to invest in a 1.5 Terabyte external hard drive. Surprisingly, at the threat of a virus or of the computers crashing for any other reason, we were still not satisfied with the security of our designs, the heartbeat to our business.

At a recent tradeshow, we came across CageData, a local Wallingford small business specializing in networking and data management. Consulting with us to at least recognize price points, it became pretty evident that it was necessary for us to make some upgrades and improvements. The initial recommendation, a cloud server. For around a $2,000 package, all of our files would be backed up to an offsite, digital location that would be secure in the event of any power outages, natural disasters, viruses, malware, or theft. Not only the peace of mind, but the extra insurance offered as a preventive measure is pretty convincing to make this investment itself.

Everybody deals with a slow computer from time to time. But when the computer is the foundation to your business, some solutions, regardless of initial startup costs, are necessary to not only consider but to budget for implementation. This cloud database for us, a way to backup all of our files and to keep them safe from anything dumb that we may do, is absolutely perfect. Not only will it free up and incredible amount of memory on our RAM and space on our hard drive to increase efficiency at the computer (start up time, networking, speed, downloading, etc), but will allow us to be confident in the pledge to our customers we continually make. If our computers crashed, it would merely seem like making an excuse, but the possibility of having a system that can prevent us from losing the files (ever?), is a source of technology to absolutely invest in.