What are the factors of cloud storage strategy?
By answering these questions, your business can better determine whether it will make more sense to migrate applications to data, or whether it will make more sense to migrate data to applications.
Hill also suggested focusing on the enterprise's cloud strategy. Of course, cloud services have become a milestone in current mainstream technology. For example, according to CompTIA ’s Cloud Computing Research Trends Analysis Report, more than 90% of respondents ’companies are turning to cloud computing to meet their business needs, while one-third of companies are doing their best Use cloud services. Nevertheless, in many ways, the cloud is still in a lagging state of maturity.
This decision should also consider security, and the five key areas of integration, manageability, performance, cost, and scalability.
Security is paramount
Both Robinson and Hill agreed that security is the most important aspect of any cloud storage strategy.
They say that as mission-critical applications and related data move to cloud services, cloud security is more important than ever. Robinson emphasized that enterprises must reconsider the security surrounding cloud storage and view this issue from the perspective of business continuity and disaster recovery, including the traditional security thinking of backup and recovery. He believes that not all backed up data is equally important. Enterprises should determine which data is the most critical and treat them with differentiated management accordingly.
Well, this involves the protection of the data itself. According to Hill, a company's system must be "protected as well as data."
Therefore, companies must know exactly the steps that cloud service providers take to protect their data and ensure compliance. Who accessed what data? Who owns the encryption key? How much security is in the application?
At a minimum, cloud providers should provide encryption for data in transit and at rest, but this is often not enough. Ultimately, the responsibility for ensuring customer data security lies with the enterprise itself, not the cloud service provider. The focus is on the enterprise to ensure that there is no data leakage.
In some cases, companies may need to take appropriate actions to solve the problem of how suppliers protect data. Robinson suggested whether it is possible to increase the security of the content provided by the cloud provider through internal protection, or may turn to another provider for additional security.
It is worth noting that although strong security is important, sometimes it may be too much. Experts warn that too much or wrong security can hinder performance or have a negative impact on the user experience, so finding the balance is crucial.
Integration and manageability
Because few enterprise organizations will switch to the all-cloud storage model, they must integrate traditional local storage within the enterprise with new cloud-based systems.
Storage area network (SAN) and network-attached storage (NAS) solutions deployed on premises often use block-level and file-level storage, while cloud storage uses an object-based model. Data migration between the two brings the possibility of data loss and requires software that can integrate these two systems.
Then there are the cloud-to-cloud components. Organizations that have experienced growth in cloud adoption are likely to rely on data with multiple storage points in multiple clouds to process applications. Migrating data from one cloud to another cloud may pose many risks. Although cloud storage usually relies on an object-based model, Hill pointed out that unless both clouds use the same metadata architecture, data migration is by no means a simple process that requires export and import.
Ideally, for end users, cloud storage should look like it can be executed like local storage, and data should be seamlessly migrated from one cloud environment to another. If the person maintaining the system needs to constantly patch or adjust the application, this will result in inefficient use of resources, thereby increasing downtime and bringing new security risks.
Performance issues: speed, latency and availability
When it comes to performance, we must first increase speed and reduce latency. And, in fact, these factors are critical to achieving performance benchmarks-and when a large file is migrated from one cloud to another cloud service, it is even more important.
Data must be stored and backed up in a manner that minimizes delayed access. Integration and manageability also have a direct impact on performance. For end users, it should be able to achieve seamlessly connected data for any application on any platform.
It is also worth considering usability. According to a survey by 451 Research, more than one-third of respondents believe that better availability and flexibility are the advantages of cloud storage. This raises the question of whether the deployment conditions of cloud storage are affecting the ability of an enterprise organization, or even satisfying its SLA. For some data, the impact of one or two hours of downtime is minimal; but for some other data, even a few seconds of downtime may be catastrophic. The key is to understand the differences and ensure that measures are in place to avoid harmful downtime.
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