Blog: Data in the Clouds?

Working with Travel agents gives us the opportunity to work with people that come from diverse backgrounds. The travel industry attracts people with all types of education and work experience. We have some very technical users, and users who focus on business, travel, family, or anything but technology. That is one of the things we love about working with travel agents!

One of the selling points of Tess that we like to talk about is that we are cloud based. You probably hear this from a lot of services, from email to streaming television. If you are someone who does not focus on technology, "the cloud" may not mean much to you. This post is to help explain why it is a good thing.

This is a scene from our introduction video, explaining why Tess is "Smarter":

You can see the full video on our home page.

So why is the cloud smarter, and what does it really mean? Putting something "in the cloud" just means you do not have a physical server that you have to manage. When it is done right, it means that your data is hosted across multiple servers in multiple locations so if any single computer fails your data is secure. Gmail is a good example of this - if you use Gmail you probably do not store any of your email locally. Google stores it securely in multiple locations so it is alway easy for you to get to. If any single computer fails, your data is still safe because there is redundancy built in.

But be careful, because the cloud gives a feeling of security but it can be implemented poorly. In contrast to Google, if you are getting your email from a small independent company your "cloud based email" may be on a single machine. Even if that machine is hosted in a cloud data center, if it has a failure you may still lose all of your data. It is always a good idea to ask what exactly the cloud means when you do business with a new company that promises to host something in the cloud!

Here at Travel eSolutions, we use Amazon's data centers to host our web servers and database servers. This gives us security, redundancy, and fault tolerance built in from the ground up. In addition to server and network level redundancy, we are constantly syncing backups of your data to another location, so in the unlikely event of a large scale failure that gets past all of the built in redundancy, we always have current copies that are easy to bring online. And because we do not depend on physical computers, we can easily add new servers to our solution during busy times. We also always have multiple web servers behind our solutions, even when times are slow. If one server has a problem another server takes over automatically.

We always remember that this is your data, and your business depends on it. Our most important job is making sure it stays secure and available!

We spend a lot of time thinking about these types of problems and trying different solutions. If you have problems or questions related to hosting and the cloud in your own business I would be happy to talk with you about it.
Send me an email (stephen@travelesolutions.com) to let me know what problems you have or what is working well for you.