I run a software company called Tyrannical Smiles, out of San Jose, California. We focus on the ever growing video game industry. We have a series of successful science-fiction adventure role playing games that we have created, and are constantly upgrading the scenarios and adding new add ons all the time. We have a large customer base that is constantly growing and ordering more of our software as it becomes available. With this, we run into the situation of having their credit information on file as well as transaction histories that would be extremely detrimental to our company if they ever got lost or hacked. The way we have decided to backup our system is as soon as a customer uploads their information to make a purchase, it is immediately transferred into the system as a temporary file, at the end of each work day, we have all the temporary files transferred to our Cloud. The Cloud infrastructure allows for our company to securely share our files amongst one another, with also insuring that our information remains just that, ours. To guarantee that our Cloud isn’t hacked or if the server goes down or fails, our information isn’t lost, we have set the system to run with a Cloud Encryption Key rotation. We are using a split key encryption, meaning that I am the only one that has access to the key. No one including the government has access to this key. Be that as it may, security is always the number one priority for data so every month I change my encryption key to ensure that further security is in place. After one calendar month of information is gathered, we save all the data and transfer it using a hard disk. This hard disk is then taken by me once a month to a safety deposit box I have setup at a bank to store all the information securely. So once the information is in the Cloud, if the server fails for some reason, we will not lose any of our data that was previously in the Cloud, as well as having the hard disk at the bank. In past Cloud crashes the system has reportedly been down only a few hours before it is able to be restored and up and running again. Once again, any previous data saved to the Cloud will be intact. Now, we also run a program entitled BigQuery that we enter each of our five data sets into. Our data sets are as follow: customer payment information, Software upgrades, Gaming scenarios, Customer payment and information, and Employee records. This makes locating the information that one requires very simple and quick by using BigQuery because it almost instantaneously locates the sought after information with just a few clicks. Due to all of our information being in the cloud and backed up with hard disks at the bank, in the situation of a catastrophic event, none of the data would be lost aside from unsaved information someone was currently working on that had not been transferred to the cloud or hard disk. Meaning that all that would be lost was one days of work, instead of something huge like month or even just one weeks’ worth of work. We also have in place R1Soft’sCDP to power our remote backup service. This makes testing data recover very easy, all you have to do is order a cloud server instance, launch the R1 Softbare-metal recovery too, adjust the network settings, then reboot and test. This usually takes about two and a half hours to complete and gives a great idea of how long it takes to back up your system. So all in all I feel very confident about how secure my system is for storing my company’s information and am constantly checking for new ways of making my system more secure. So far, the cloud along with BigQuery have made everyday life at Tyrannical Smiles much easier and more productive for our customers as well as with employees.