CSS provides online hosting for all our software products. This means you don’t have to worry about:

  • Servers
  • Routers
  • Bandwidth
  • Firewalls
  • Security updates for hosted servers and firewalls
  • CSS software updates

CSS utilizes Microsoft Azure’s cloud product Azure.Microsoft.com

Simply put, cloud computing is the delivery of computing services—servers, storage, databases, networking, software, analytics, and more—over the Internet (“the cloud”).

CSS is a Microsoft Perferred Partner. CSS utilizes Microsoft to provide our clients with a best-of-breed hardware infrastructure to maximize computing operations and security. Ninety percent of Fortune 500 companies trust the Microsoft Cloud. By partnering with CSS, our clients take advantage of Microsoft security, privacy, transparency, and the most compliance coverage of any cloud provider.

 

Top benefits of cloud computing

Cloud computing is a big shift from the traditional way businesses think about IT resources. Why is cloud computing so popular? Here are 6 common reasons organizations are turning to cloud computing services:

Cost

Cloud computing eliminates the capital expense of buying hardware and software and setting up and running on-site datacenters—the racks of servers, the round-the-clock electricity for power and cooling, the IT experts for managing the infrastructure. It adds up fast.

Speed

Most cloud computing services are provided self service and on demand, so even vast amounts of computing resources can be provisioned in minutes, typically with just a few mouse clicks, giving businesses a lot of flexibility and taking the pressure off capacity planning.

Global scale

The benefits of cloud computing services include the ability to scale elastically. In cloud speak, that means delivering the right amount of IT resources—for example, more or less computing power, storage, bandwidth—right when its needed, and from the right geographic location.

Productivity

On-site datacenters typically require a lot of “racking and stacking”—hardware set up, software patching, and other time-consuming IT management chores. Cloud computing removes the need for many of these tasks, so IT teams can spend time on achieving more important business goals.

Performance

The biggest cloud computing services run on a worldwide network of secure datacenters, which are regularly upgraded to the latest generation of fast and efficient computing hardware. This offers several benefits over a single corporate datacenter, including reduced network latency for applications and greater economies of scale.

Reliability

Cloud computing makes data backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity easier and less expensive, because data can be mirrored at multiple redundant sites on the cloud provider’s network.

Back-up Services

CSS provides a robust and secure multi layered back-up process for all of our clients and systems. Our back-up services can be customized to meet specific needs.

Back-up services are provided by CSS through Microsoft Azure. The systems and data are backed up every night. Microsoft Azure Backups retains a copy of the backup for 30 days. Microsoft Azure backup provides redundant multi-geographic location storage so your system and data backup is never in just one location. The daily data is retained for 30 days.

CSS performs nightly backups of each SQL server database. The backup is stored locally and is copied to an Azure Storage container. Each Azure Storage container is replicated locally and geo-replicated across multiple data centers.

Full Database Backup – SQL Server Managed Backup to Microsoft Azure agent schedules a full database backup if any of the following is true.

A database is SQL Server Managed Backup to Microsoft Azure enabled for the first time, or when SQL Server Managed Backup to Microsoft Azure is enabled with default settings at the instance level. The log growth since last full database backup is equal to or larger than 1 GB. The maximum time interval of one week has passed since the last full database backup.

The log chain is broken. SQL Server Managed Backup to Microsoft Azure periodically checks to see whether the log chain is intact by comparing the first and last LSNs of the backup files. If there is break in the log chain for any reason, SQL Server Managed Backup to Microsoft Azure schedules a full database backup.

In addition to the nightly backups CSS also uses Azure SQL Managed Backups to back up the SQL Server databases. Azure SQL Managed Backups maintains a 30-day backup of each database in an Azure Storage container that is replicated locally and geo-replicated across multiple data centers.

Transaction Log Backup – SQL Server Managed Backup to Microsoft Azure schedules a log backup if any of the following is true:

There is no log backup history that can be found. This is usually true when SQL Server Managed Backup to Microsoft Azure is enabled for the first time. The transaction log space used is 5 MB or larger. The maximum time interval of 2 hours since the last log backup is reached.

Any time the transaction log backup is lagging behind a full database backup.