Amazon Web Services

One of the things that often confounds small business computer technicians  is what kind of backup will get them the most bang for the customers buck. Let's face it there is a huge difference between the budget of a medium sized enterprise and that of the the soho, or five workstation small business office.

Small business can't afford the proffesional tape backup or tape library offerings. Hard disk space is increasing every day. That means there is more data on laptops, desktops, and files servers to backup. Many businesses are also becoming aware of the fact that on offiste backup is also critical to a disaster recovery plans. So how do you get a cheap, offsite, expandable backup service for small business? 3 words: Jungle Disk, and AWS.

AWS stands for Amazon web services. It represents a collection of services that Amazon is offering to business from their extensive data centers. Among other things storage and cloud applications are targeted users. AWS is not service with client software. It is a structure with an API so that programmers can manage and access the space in a  variety of ways. That's where Jungle Disk comes in. 

Jungle Disk is a cheap little program that can access your AWS account and either map it as a network drive and or backup your data to it. The price is the real kicker. While most other services charge a premium for thise kind of service AWS lets it for a measly $0.15 per gigabyte for the first 50 terabytes. Know anybody with more than 5o TB of data? Thought so, me neither.

This means that for a few dollars a month small business can cover the backup and offisite backup bases. If your small business client has a couple of sales people on the road, but is unable to spring for a VPN you can also add the Jungle Disk Workgroup feature. This feature allows you to control access to the folders in your share. With the simple Jungle Disk client multiple users can access the same share, but with the workgroup feature access to directories is contingent on the proper credentials.