Overview
The O4 cloud is based on existing technology developed by Ingen Software over several decades. The original intent for much of the cloud software was to simply create a passive but up-to-date backup of the OASIS database for our customers in areas where Mother Nature could very well destroy the office (e.g. a tornado or hurricane). Since then, we have saved many companies by providing access to their data after a number of failures. Building on this proven technology not only opens new feature for OASIS, but provides a built in ACTIVE offsite backup!
OASIS Cloud - Before O4
Before O4, the OASIS cloud backup and cloud sync technologies offered the ability to move data between a database running in our customer's office and the O4 cloud server. The data is almost immediately written to the database - but the database is kept in an offline state. The idea is have a "passive backup" just in case there was a failure of the database in our customer's office.
Some customers also added sync - that is moving data between the different offices. Over the years, our ability to move data between offices has improved a lot. Too many technical details to discuss here, but the delays are about as small as you would expect - although the internet can be finicky at times. (One big update that helped was moving those big attachments after all the transaction data.)
What we didn't like about the old cloud services was that anytime a customer had a failure, we had to copy the Passive database to a location where access was possible to "spin up" the database. This could take hours! With a frustrated customer! The other element we didn't like was the inactive DB is essentially copied through log files to a second OASIS data center. Sometimes the offsite backup would lag making the offsite backup data days or even weeks old. Although never required, we were looking for more.
The OASIS O4 Cloud Servers
The O4 servers change the picture by essentially treating the inactive database like another sync database, making it fully active. Additionally, this new active database is the database behind the O4 web server. Any changes made in that database are synchronized back to the database in the office with the users. Yes, a sales person adding a document (maybe a picture) as a project attachment will sync back to the office for the quoter to see.
Also note more of the "Data Center" clouds. In the past, all of our OASIS servers were owned by Ingen Software and kept in various data centers. We will continue this process as we have found that having control over the hardware allows us to fine-tune O4. However, we have partnered with different could service vendors allowing us to position data geographically. The primary goal was to allow Canadian customers to keep their data in Canada. As we continue the partnerships, we will position customer data to be in different geographic locations (North America only) to protect from natural disasters and Internet provider outages. (Even the big guys go "offline" once in a while.) Contact support if you would like more information about where your data is physical located.
This is the O4 Cloud. It is much more than OASIS in a browser - O4 is also protecting your data!
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