Cloud: the future of storage is here

Using cloud services for data backup and storage is becoming increasingly common among businesses of all sizes. According to Richard Vester, Director of Cloud Services at EOH, hardware-based storage was long the favoured option because companies looked to protect their data from hacking and loss of privacy. That control is now easily accessible through cloud-based options, which is far more cost-effective.

According to Research and Markets, although organisations are increasing their IT budgets, in-house management of large volumes of data incurs high cost and companies are therefore rapidly moving towards cloud storage services.

A Research and Markets report finds the global cloud storage market is expected to grow at approximately CAGR 29% during 2015-2021. "The cloud computing storage market is majorly driven by the growing use of social media for business activities and the growing e-commerce activities. Although the security and primary concerns will continue to hamper the market growth, emergence of various cloud security services will create better opportunities for the cloud storage market," it states.

"To remain competitive in today's business environment, an organisation must consistently deliver quick access to time-sensitive information. Advances in memory, CPU, bus, and network speeds have helped to facilitate this acceleration. However, in a virtualised environment, the storage infrastructure often becomes the I/O bottleneck. In fact, 53% of respondents in a recent VMware survey indicate they experience storage performance issues. Legacy storage arrays with spinning disk simply cannot deliver the high IOPS and low latency necessary for large virtual environments running tier-one workloads," Vester explains.

"Since most storage solutions on the market today come with compromises (hybrid or all-flash, compression or deduplication, block or file protocol support), it comes as no surprise that close to two-thirds of respondents say that they use multiple storage vendors for their primary data. This practice, again, causes unnecessary cost and complexity."

A simpler solution to help eliminate storage bottlenecks and accelerate IT services is cloud-based storage. This will allow improved application response times, end-user satisfaction, and convenient access to data - no matter how old it is.

"It's not enough to simply back up on an external hard drive kept in your office. Keeping data backed up on an in-house server is only the first step in data protection, and requires a secondary backup that is off-site and highly secure. The cloud offers this redundancy as a built-in function, at no additional cost," he explains.

Vester adds that ease of use is one of the main advantages of cloud solutions for data storage. Setting it up is simple and backups can be automated so they are done regularly, and can be scheduled for a convenient time (overnight, for example). You also avoid the ongoing maintenance costs you face with hardware.

"Cloud storage requires much less of an investment than physical storage, and can easily be scaled up or down as your needs change. And in today's mobile workspace, having your data stored and backed up on the cloud means you can access it from anywhere with an Internet connection. It also makes it easy for you to share that data with employees and clients around the world."

Many public cloud providers, such as Dropbox and Amazon Web Services, offer free or really cheap storage options. However, the use of a public cloud provider opens up questions of data ownership as many insist on terms and conditions that will allow them access to your data, Vester explains. For that reason, he suggests looking at the offerings from various providers to see if that loophole is included.

"Many companies look for cloud storage that doubles as a workflow application where files can be shared and tasks assigned. A number of applications do that these days, so it's unnecessary to complicate the storage aspect. In addition, many industries require that data be stored for a very long period of time, and it's pointless to try and store all of that data together with newer data that needs to be accessed more frequently."

He adds that many cloud storage options are approaching the "free" price point, but that businesses need tailored solutions in order to enable the utility to have everything available online, when they need it and how they need it. "Why would anyone buy all this storage when it is available online for free? Sometimes the old rules of thumb are correct - if you're not buying something, you're not the customer. By using a customised, specific cloud storage solution, you are dispensing with all of the risk and gaining all of the benefits offered by cloud storage."