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Mobility and Scalablity of Public Cloud Storage

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Ruchika Goel
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cloud storage
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With the explosion of voice and visual data, it has become untenable for each and every organization to cater to their requirements individually, thereby making the public cloud an attractive option to store important data 

Two things that have become synonymous with every IT leader in the enterprise is: Cost efficiency and improved performance. One of the sure shot ways to achieve both these objectives is to use the existing IT footprint more optimally. These tasks are always easier said than done. However, cloud computing provides an avenue for organizations to achieve the twin goals of lesser capital outlays and increased efficiency and performance. Within cloud, storage is among the biggest asks from clients which have realized the business benefits of storing some types of corporate data in the cloud instead of consuming valuable floor space in their own datacenter.

Every company has different requirements and data storage needs. The traditional approach was to buy more and more products to build up the on-premise storage capacity. However, with the explosion of voice and visual data, it has become untenable for each and every organization to cater to their requirements individually, thereby making the public cloud an attractive option to store important data. Given that the access to the content is by users who are geographically spread and many of whom now come over the internet from a connectivity perspective, the idea of moving storage to a public cloud with adequate enterprise class security becomes an attractive proposition.

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Reasons for Moving to Public Cloud Storage

One of the key reasons for using cloud for storage is that the maintenance cost for raised-floor, air-conditioned data center space is expensive. If the datacenter is full, moving sporadically used data such as archived prints, transaction records can free up precious space. And, even if a datacenter is not fully engaged, purchasing additional storage capacity might not be a good investment or might require additional power or cooling. In this case, shifting some data to a cloud-storage provider is often a better substitute.

Another reason is to follow the best practice method for storing data through the use of a distinct second site. Taking the route of cloud storage is generally much more economical than building a second datacenter.

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A third reason for moving to the cloud is mobility and scalability. New applications that have been built specifically for web 3.0 generation perform better if the storage is outside the corporate datacenter. Social and mobile applications depend on reactions, missing an opportunity to engage a customer is equivalent to missing an opportunity for business growth.

Cloud-based storage helps on two fronts, storing the data closer to the client improves the response time and also more importantly, cloud provides instantaneous scalability. For example, imagine a mobile employee working on a sale and checking records to see if the product is available and ready for shipping. Every fraction of a second of latency could mean the difference between closure and a happy customer. Now imagine that same scenario, but during the busiest shopping season of the year. Imagine the query being generated a million times per minute! Not only does storing data on servers closer to where the employee save valuable time, most of the data generated “on the edge” doesn’t need to be stored on the data center floor at all; back-office systems do not need to know every check-in from the customer, just significant events like a notification generated would be enough.

The cloud storage also works well for scenarios requiring access of data to run through big data and analytics. By storing the data that feeds into these processes on the cloud, companies can take advantage of their variable nature and rapidly provide the exact amount of compute capacity required to meet the demands of a seasonal business or a new analytics experiment. For a retailer, leveraging cloud-based storage during the festive season would allow deep analysis of daily sales data without buying lots of disk drives and processing power that won’t be used for rest of the year.

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That said, not all data lend itself to be moved to the cloud. Banks, hospitals store critical personal information that come with stringent SLA and privacy policies. Some government regulations require CIOs to have exact knowledge of the physical location of certain data, something that can be difficult in the cloud. Sensitive financial information needs to be tracked for years, and many companies feel it’s safer to rely on their own techniques than to try to write service level agreements that provide the durability and security assurances they need.

But even the most cautious companies and CIOs can find opportunities within the system to take advantage of the benefits that cloud provides. A few cloud service providers are able to provide enterprise category security for the data residing in an off-premise cloud which mitigates the risks that the CIOs were otherwise grappling with while considering a public cloud or an off-premise private cloud.

The first step before looking at the cloud option would be to perform an audit to assess the costs of storing data on-premises, taking into account internal SLA that outlines both the durability (chances of an irretrievable loss) and availability of the data (percentage of time it is accessible). With this in hand, the CIO has enough data to directly compare the cost and SLA of the public cloud providers.

A clear understanding of costs and benefits will help enterprises evaluate whether cloud is an attractive option or not. Simply building more private data-center capacity without evaluating cloud based storage alternatives is not something that a cost focused CIO would do any longer.

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