There has been lots of talk about Amazon’s EC2 Outage last week. Of course there are some concerns about trusting servers or data storage in the cloud. Does that mean that the cloud is too risky and businesses should avoid using cloud-based services like ShareFile? No. In fact, ShareFile’s servers are located in facilities that are managed by Windstream Hosted Solutions and Amazon Web Services and are spread across multiple availability zones in Amazon. ShareFile customers did not experience any downtime with the recent outage, due to the way our system is architected. We use all 5 of Amazon’s major data centers: Northern Virginia, California, Ireland, Singapore and Japan.

According to Jesse Lipson, CEO of ShareFile,

“We have a whole farm of servers, spread across availability zones, that handle uploads and downloads. These servers are interchangeable, so if one or multiple servers go down, customers are not affected. We also have systems in place that constantly check each of our upload and download servers for a ‘heartbeat’, hitting a page on the servers that returns the ‘vital signs’ regarding the load of the server and it’s level of utilization. If the vital signs are not healthy (or if the server doesn’t respond to the heartbeat request), the server is automatically dropped from our server farm.”

Additionally, our data centers are designed to be protected in the instance of a weather-related event, with features such as hurricane-rated roofs, with multiple redundant power sources. Our servers are also designed to protect against data loss by mirroring all data in real-time to two separate locations and performing incremental and full backups of all system data.

Want to learn more about how we protect your data? Visit our Security Information page.

Interested in looking at our security report? Click here to download it in PDF format.