The Case for Cloud storage in Canada: For those who truly care about their clients data

 

These days storing data in the cloud is done on a fairly routine basis. That being said,  where the data is physically located has become more of a relevant consideration in recent months due to changes to US law. Different countries have different rules, in this post we explore the case for protecting your clients data privacy when it’s stored in Canada correctly.

Most people are aware that if your data is stored on servers in the United States, laws such as the Patriot Act, PRISM and the newest CLOUD act of 2018 all apply. In effect, they allow US agencies to review your files with minimal effort and while incognito.

The goal of the CLOUD act was designed to help American agencies solve the legal challenges of cross-border data collection and the application of US law in those foreign territories. The result is that this law now enables the US government to legally access data outside the US that is being managed by US companies. In effect, the data is considered under US custody & control. In addition, the same US agencies can enforce a communication ban for US companies to not disclose that the data has been collected. Specifically this legislation seems to have been written to resolve the problem of US agencies not technically having the legal right to sniff data in foreign territories as they have done in the past in Ireland →  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp._v._United_States

 

What Does This Mean for Canadians and their privacy ?

Do you know who is in control of your data? This question is becoming increasingly important for Canadians. Sectors such as health and education (especially those in provinces with stricter laws data such as British Columbia) should pay particular attention to the location and availability of confidential customer information.

Some major cloud companies may look like trusted providers if they have data centers in Canada. But placement does not matter if these companies are owned in the United States.

Where your data is stored and who has access to it, the information you need to know. If you choose a service provider, Server Cloud Canada recommends asking the following questions:

  1. Although the data center is located in Canada, does cloud provider is a Canadian company that understands data sovereignty?
  2. Can I trust how the shipping provider will handle my data?
  3. Can I protect my data against unauthorized access or recovery?
  4. Can I trust that data is always in the host country?


Perhaps the one thing that most everyone can agree on (aside from the particularly sneaky way that the law was approved → https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/03/23/cloud_act_spending_bill/ ) is that the CLOUD act is one of the most controversial laws passed in the US in recent hostory. Uncertainty about it continues, such as: will this law be applied continuously to circumvent the Data Protection and Privacy Act, especially those in Europe? At this point, it’s not known how the CLOUD Act will stand up to scrutiny under PIPEDA or other Canadian privacy legislation but it’s likely that Canadian agencies will work in tandem with US agencies (in silence) to collect private data in Canada legally.

Alternatively if you use Canadian servers on Canadian soil, owned by a Canadian Company, you are under the jurisdiction of Canada and its laws which generally help you take much better care of your customers privacy in a more reasonable and transparent way.

More information:

Canada has provincial and federal laws that apply to cloud storage providers. At the federal level, there are two main laws that apply including:

The Canadian Privacy Act → https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privacy_Act_(Canada)

PIPEDA – Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act → https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Information_Protection_and_Electronic_Documents_Act

 

Several Canadian provinces also have laws similar to PIPEDA including:

Alberta: http://servicealberta.ca/pipa-overview.cfm

British Columbia: http://www.bclaws.ca/EPLibraries/bclaws_new/document/ID/freeside/00_03063_01

Quebec: http://legisquebec.gouv.qc.ca/en/ShowDoc/cs/P-39.1

Ontario: https://www.ontario.ca/laws/statute/04p03

What’s a Content Delivery Network & how to configure our 100% Canadian CDN

These days high performing websites & apps often have to provide a significant amount of static content to end users. This content is typically derived of images, stylesheets, JavaScript, installer files, game assets, and videos. As the number and size of these static assets increase, bandwidth increases and thus page load times increase. This in turn degrades the user’s browser experience and reduces the available capacity of the servers.

So, to dramatically reduce page runtime, improve performance, and reduce infrastructure and bandwidth costs, you can easily implement a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to cache these resources over a set of servers that are geographically distributed across Canada.

What is a CDN?

A Content Delivery Network is a set of geographically distributed servers that deliver consistent content to end users. This static content can be almost any type of data, but CDN networks are often used to connect web pages and associated files, video and audio broadcasts, and large software packages.

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A CDN network consists of multiple points of presence (PoPs), each consisting of several edge servers that store their source inventory or host server assets. When a user visits your website and requests static assets such as images or JavaScript files, the CDN network directs your requests to the nearest perimeter (edge) server, where the content is displayed. If the edge server does not have cached or cached assets, CDN will look for and store the latest copy. If the CDN edge contains a cache entry for your assets (which happens most often if your website receives a moderate amount of traffic), it returns the cached copy to the end user in a fraction of the time it would take to get from the source web server.

This allows geographically distributed users to reduce the number of hops required to receive static content by accessing content directly from the adjacent edge cache. The result is far less latency, faster loading times for pages, and a significantly lower load on the source infrastructure.

 

How does the Bulk Storage CDN (blkstr.ca) work?

When users request objects from your Bulk Storage containers at the blkstr.ca domain, their client performs a DNS lookup. Based where the user is located geographically, the DNS server will intelligently respond with the CDN node address which is closest to them to make sure the user receives the lowest latency connection possible. Next, the local CDN pulls from its cache to serve the file directly from local fast storage, and ensures the local cache is up-to-date with the objects in your container

 

Benefits of using a CDN

Almost any site may benefit from leveraging a CDN, but the main reason for implementation is usually to load the bandwidth of the original servers on CDN servers and reduce the waiting time for distributed users geographically. Here are the top 5 most compelling reasons our clients tell us CDN is critical to how they deploy their Apps in the cloud.

  1. Origin Offload
    Primarily, a CDN will be dramatic to reduce bandwidth usage on your servers by loading static resources like images, videos, CSS, and JavaScript. A content delivery network is designed and optimized to serve static content, and customer requests for that content are sent to and served by Edge CDN servers. This has the added benefit of reducing the load on the original servers because the sheer number of get requests is at a much lower rate.
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  2. Faster Load times
    If your user base is geographically dispersed and a non-trivial part of the traffic is from an external geographic area, a CDN can reduce latency by caching static assets on edge servers closer to your users. By reducing the distance between users and static content, you can deliver content faster to users and enhance your experience by increasing page load speed. For websites serving video content for example, where high latencies and slow loading times more directly impact user experience, these benefits are compounded.
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  3. Manage traffic peaks and avoid downtime
    CDNs enable you to handle very high traffic spikes and allow burst traffic via load balancing requests on a large distributed network of edge servers. By loading and caching static content on a distribution network, you can accommodate multiple concurrent users with your existing infrastructure. For sites that use a single origin server, these large traffic spikes can often overwhelm the system, resulting in downtime and unplanned downtime. Transferring traffic to a highly accessible and redundant CDN infrastructure designed to handle varying levels of web traffic can increase the availability of your assets and content.
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  4. Reduce costs
    Because managing static content usually accounts for most of the bandwidth usage, you may reduce your monthly infrastructure costs by loading these assets over a content delivery network. In addition to reducing bandwidth costs, a CDN can reduce server costs by reducing the burden on the original servers so that your existing infrastructure can evolve. We offer usage based billing at competitive prices @ $0.05 CAD per GB of data transfer with no usage commitments or minimums. Traffic between Bulk Storage and the CDN nodes for your files is not charged for, you only pay for public egress traffic.
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  5. Increase security
    Another common use case for CDNs is DDoS attack mitigation. By leveraging a CDN you reduce the total attack vectors on your application. Our CDN service for Bulk Storage analyzes traffic across the continent for suspicious patterns, blocking malicious attack traffic while continuing to allow reputable user traffic through.

 

How to Enable CDN on your Bulk Storage Container

It’s a pretty simple two step process to put in place really. All you need to do is:

  1. Within the “More” Menu select “CDN Settings”
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    ……..
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    ..
  2. Then enable CDN functionality on your container within the Control panel
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Conclusion

A content delivery network can be a fast and effective way to improve the scalability and availability of your sites. By caching static assets on a geographically distributed network of optimized servers, you can dramatically reduce page load times and end-user latencies. In addition, CDNs allow you to dramatically reduce bandwidth consumption by absorbing user requests and responding from the edge buffer, reducing bandwidth and infrastructure costs.

With libraries that can enable support for third major frameworks like WordPress, Drupal, Django and Ruby on Rails, as well as additional features such as SSL/TLS, support for resource compression, and avoiding DoS attacks, CDNs can be a powerful tool for optimizing high traffic websites.

For technical documentation on the specifics of integrating the Bulk Storage CDN into your project, you can read our CDN documentation or if you run into an issue, you can get in touch with an expert by emailing support@clouda.ca

WordPress Backups for Beginners and Advanced Users

Backup MemeWe all know that backing up data is important. Whether it’s a corporate Windows file server, or our treasured family photos, we make sure that we can recover our data in the case of a hardware failure. Oddly enough, most folks tend to skip over their website data when considering their backup strategy.

Although WordPress is the most used CMS in the world, many users still struggle to find a good backup solution. Thankfully, using a combination of Cloud-A’s Bulk Storage and the popular Updraft Plus WordPress Backups plugin, automatically backing up and restoring your website is extremely easy and cost effective. This makes it an ideal solution for WordPress users of any skill level.

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Cloud 66 vs. Heroku – A Detailed Comparison & Business Case

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With the Canadian dollar on the decline and the high cost of popular US-based PaaS providers like Heroku, we are finding that more and more Canadian based SaaS providers, agency development shops and IT departments are on the lookout for an alternative solution that provide similar functionality at a lower cost.

You do not have to look very far. It is no secret that we are huge fans of our partner, Cloud 66. Cloud 66 provides full stack container management-as-a-service. What does this mean? Cloud 66 is DevOps-as-a-service and it provides you with everything you need to deploy, scale and protect your applications on a number of approved public clouds, including Cloud-A.

Let’s take a look at how Cloud 66 + Cloud-A stacks up against Heroku.

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How a Cloud A client saved over 265% on their monthly IAAS costs with our hourly billing model

One of the questions we often get at Cloud A is “How does billing by the hour work?”. The answer is simple. We bill by the hour instead of by the month; compared to the more traditional IAAS provider model. In some cases by the hour doesn’t matter since most instances are up and running 24/7, but in the case where environments need to be available for testing, or ad hoc / batch processing purposes, it’s extremely compelling.

One of our beta testers is a company called Maintenance Group Inc.. They are an IBM partner focused on the Asset Management / Equipment Maintenance space working with a software product called Maximo / Tivoli. Before moving to Cloud A they had dedicated environments setup for testing new installations, configuration changes to those environments and doing other intensive tasks like batch processing jobs.

As with traditional VM solutions, snapshots play a big role in how they deliver solutions to their end clients. They use snapshotting a lot to streamline the deployment process and once an environment is setup and working well they then use it as a failsafe mechanism to ensure that they always have a current rollback position. In the past, they needed to pay to have those environments active on the system. Typically were are always left on even when they were not being used. When Maintenance Group Inc. learned that with Cloud A you only pay a tiny fraction of the cost to have a snapshot image stored while not active ($0.25/GB/month), they decided to take advantage of the opportunity to file those old & seldom used environments away and only spin them up when they were needed. The result was a dramatic cost savings of over 265% compared to the previous quarter’s spend on hosted infrastructure. In addition they have found other ways to leverage Cloud A’s on demand compute power to do batch processing of large datasets.

“We’ve been very impressed with what we’ve seen at Cloud A so far. Many of our clients require their data to reside in Canada and that has prevented us from leveraging the large US based providers who have billing by the hour solutions like this to date. This is a great solution for them as well as for our clients in the Caribbean & the US regions. It’s great to have a Canadian solution like this” – Jeff Seaward,  Maintenance Group Inc.