Budget limitations combined with exploding data volumes are pushing many organizations to seek more cost-effective storage options – and increasingly, that means cloud storage. Cloud storage offers a number of key benefits over traditional storage solutions:
- Cloud storage is a lower-cost alternative to traditional storage, which requires significant capital investments and management overhead. Some industry studies have calculated that in-house storage is at least five times more expensive to own and run per gigabyte than cloud storage, once all the costs are included.
- Cloud storage is more agile than in-house storage infrastructure, enabling organizations to “thin provision” storage and eliminate underutilized storage silos. Whether delivered via the public Internet or private intranet, cloud storage is inherently scalable and responsive to resource demands.
- Cloud storage makes it easier to select the appropriate storage platform for various categories of data. Cloud storage is particularly well-suited for backup, archival and disaster recovery/business continuity. It also is the ideal repository for ever-increasing volumes of email, text files and other unstructured data.
- There are a number of cloud computing options available to organizations, including public, private and hybrid clouds. The key to success lies in choosing the right cloud deployment model for various storage requirements and determining how cloud storage fits into the overall IT architecture.
- Of course, anyone investigating cloud storage technologies must ask serious questions about data security and availability. Nevertheless, cloud storage promises tremendous cost savings by reducing the need for complex in-house storage architectures, along with incredible scalability and the flexibility of on-demand capacity.
