Storage is the most the valued component in Infrastructure and often companies end up spending lot for deploying and maintaining on-prem storage.
There are other over heads of maintaining RPO/RTO on storage, patching etc when leveraging on-prem storage.
With cloud emerging so fast and rapid, there are many key offerings on Cloud that would drive any organization to use cloud. Here are the top 5:
Costs:
Cloud storage is cheap compared to on-prem. The costs including maintenance, power are the direct savings that any organization would benefit. On top of this, all cloud service offer pay per use model which allow organization to pay only to what they use.
Organizations can also leverage cloud as a “ Disaster Recovery” strategy where they can move/replicate their production data loads for DR purposes. This strategy is much cheaper compared to having an exact DR strategy on another on premises Data Center.
Scalability:
One of the pain points of Data Center based storage solutions exists in the fact that scaling the existing storage. Storage projections may or may not match the actual usage. Sometimes companies end up spending more thinking of “buffer” for future. Cloud provides great scalability where organizations do not need to worry on data growth patterns.
Durability:
Cloud providers in general offer a great level of durability on the data that is stored in cloud. AWS for that matter offers 99.99999999999 ( 11 9’s ) durability which means that there is a chance of losing one file in roughly 659000 years.
Ease of access:
One of the greatest advantages of the having data on cloud is ease of access, with a simple internet connection and proper authentication/authorization one can access data from anywhere. ( There are certain intricacies on how data on cloud is managed like how/who/what can access data and how to securely access storage which I’m not touching here. Security is broader topic and any component on cloud should be tightly coupled with proper security to avoid data going to wrong hands. )
Storage independence:
On traditional Data center based storage, there are always conversation on a given make/model/vendor is not supported after sometime and there has to be a move to a better model, this is continuous process. This is always pain process. With Cloud, organizations need not worry on who is the storage vendor/what model and when will their end of life approach as this will be the responsibility of Cloud provider. This is very big leverage for any organization which allow them to focus on how to organize their data, how to use that data.
Conclusion:
In conclusion there are many aspects that drive any organization to move to cloud storage. The points discussed above are some of the key areas with are most beneficial to any organization. However, there are certain aspects like Compliance, Data Management, Security and Bandwidth limitations which are the anti patterns to cloud. One has to balance every aspect and make a move to use cloud storage to get the most out of it.
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