The tech industry is full of buzz words; each month, some new technology shows up that people can’t stop talking about. A few recent tech trends that seem to have stuck around are “the cloud” and “virtualization”. The general description of “the cloud” seems to be that your data is simply floating in cyberspace, ready for you to access anywhere, while virtualization is the process of taking a physical system and making it completely virtual. That certainly sounds impressive, but what exactly does this mean to you?
Not all cloud hosting is the same. Cloud hosted data has to be physically hosted somewhere. Real clouds don’t yet have data storage capacity, so this usually consists of a server or a farm of servers which hold the data. These servers are publicly visible online, so you can access data at any location, from any device. Simply log in, and the server opens a connection to you. CNet System LLC hosts our servers locally in Green Bay Wisconsin, with real people who manage them and provide support. Unlike some cloud hosted solutions, you know where your data is actually going, and if something goes wrong, someone is always here to help. Data is regularly backed up, and servers are kept on battery backups to ensure low downtimes and high reliability.
Our primary cloud hosted service is virtualized Windows servers. Server virtualization allows you to take the capability of a server, which previously was a physical machine at your place of business, and move it into a virtual file that is timeshared on a much more powerful off-site server. Virtualization allows a full image of a server to be backed up independently of hardware, which can then be moved between physical servers and hosted entirely within a cloud based environment, allowing you to access your server from anywhere in the world. We manage all backups and server maintenance, so the cost and complexity of running a server is largely diminished. In the event of a hardware failure, the virtual server can be quickly restored from a backup and run on another host server without losing any configuration.