As part of our ongoing attempts to streamline StrataMax systems and corresponding costs related to data storage, we're introducing DocMax Online Document Hosting, a secure cloud solution designed to help you manage documents more efficiently while lowering storage costs.
From your perspective, there's no noticeable change - everything stays familiar, with only a minimal delay when opening or previewing older documents.
How It Works
DocMax Online seamlessly shifts your documents to our secure private Azure cloud:
- Documents upload automatically each night.
- Recent documents stay cached locally for quick access (30 days – configurable).
- Cloud-stored documents load normally, with just a slight delay to retrieve from Azure.
- Metadata (titles, categories, searchable text) stays local for rapid searching.
What This Means for You
- Reduced Costs: Significantly lower local storage and backup expenses.
- Improved Performance: Lighter local storage means faster server operation.
- Quick Backups and Recovery: Smaller backups speed up backup processes and recovery times.
- High Security: Secure storage in Azure's Australia East data centre, fully compliant with Australian data regulations.
- Simplified Upgrades: Easier and cheaper future server migrations.
Understanding Your Cost Savings
Typical local storage scenarios include additional replication and backup costs:
- Storage Costs: $0.10 to $0.60 per GB/month.
- Replication Impact: Typically 3 to 4 additional database backup copies on disk + server snapshots multiplied by number of days snapshots are kept.
- e.g 3 days live SQL backups on the server, and 30 days of system snapshots.
- Backup Costs: Additional offline or cloud backups ($0.10 to $0.30 per GB/month).
Combining these, your actual monthly storage expenses often range from $0.50 to over $2.00 per GB/month.
DocMax Online Cost: Only $0.30 per GB/month, inclusive of storage, replication, and backups.
Getting Started
Setup is seamless and handled gradually overnight, typically completed within a few weeks. We'll coordinate directly with the Smile IT team throughout.
Requirements:
- Stable internet connection (minimum 50 MB/s upload/download).
Built-in Security and Backups
Your data is securely stored with Azure Zone-Redundant Storage (ZRS) in Australia East, providing reliable access and comprehensive backups:
- Operational backups: Continuous, retained for 42 days.
- Vaulted backups:
- Daily backups (21 days)
- Weekly backups (6 weeks)
- Monthly backups (12 months)
All backups for DocMax Azure storage are included at no extra charge.
