How to prepare for cloud storage in the future?

Start with three questions:

What applications are you supporting (based on SaaS, cloud or on-premises?) And how well are they supported?

What are the performance requirements and other requirements of the application? For example, latency is a big issue that directly affects whether you can reach a service level agreement (SLA).

What other factors are involved?

By answering these questions, you can determine whether it makes more sense to bring the application to the data or bring the data to the application.

Hill also suggested that cloud strategy should be consulted. Of course, cloud computing has broken all the milestones of mainstream technology. For example, CompTIA found in the 2016 cloud computing trend study that in order to meet the needs of enterprises, more than 90% of respondents are turning to cloud computing, and one-third are fully using cloud computing . However, in many ways, cloud computing is still in a lagging state of maturity.

Hill said, "We should not treat cloud computing as a binary decision, choose it at an appropriate time, and define what cloud and on-premises deployment can do for you."

In addition, the joint environment of multiple managed clouds, public cloud and local private cloud can not be ignored. The key is to "know which part of your architecture is best for each model."

This decision should take into account the five key issues of security, integration, manageability, performance, cost and scalability

Safety is paramount

Hill believes that security is the most important aspect of any cloud storage strategy.

They say that as mission-critical applications and related data go to the cloud, cloud security is more important than ever. Enterprises must rethink security around storage and jump out of the conventional security thinking of backup and recovery, looking at it from the perspective of business continuity and disaster recovery. Not all backup data is equally important. Enterprises should determine which data is the most critical, and then deal with it accordingly.

Then there is the issue of protecting the data itself. A system is almost equivalent to data protection, so companies must have a solid understanding of the actions taken by cloud vendors to protect their data and ensure compliance. Who has access to the data? Who has the encryption key? How safe is the application?

At a minimum, cloud providers should provide encryption for data being transferred and at rest, but this is often not enough. Ultimately, the responsibility for protecting customer business data is not the cloud provider, but the company itself ensuring that there is no data leakage.

In some cases, companies may need to take action to address how vendors protect data—whether internal protection can increase the services provided by cloud providers, or they may turn to another vendor for additional security.

It is worth noting that although security is tough, it is important to be aware that too much or misplaced security may hinder the user experience or even negatively affect the user experience, so it is important to find balance.

Integration and manageability

Since few companies will switch to the all-cloud storage model, they must integrate traditional local storage with new cloud-based systems.

Local storage area network (SAN) and network-attached storage (NAS) solutions usually use block-level and file-level storage, while cloud storage uses object storage. Data migration between the two may result in data loss, and software that can integrate the two systems is also required.

Then there are the cloud-to-cloud components. Enterprises that have experienced organic cloud growth may be facing applications that rely on data stored in multiple clouds with multiple access points, and migrating data from one cloud to another cloud may pose many risks. Hill pointed out that even if cloud storage usually relies on an object-based model, unless both clouds use the same metadata architecture, migrating data is not an easy task because it requires export and import.

Ideally, for end users, cloud storage should look, feel, and execute similar to local storage, and data should seamlessly migrate from one cloud environment to another. If the system maintenance personnel are constantly patching or adjusting applications, resources will not be fully utilized, downtime will increase and new security risks will be introduced.

If you want to know more, our website has product specifications for cloud storage, you can go to ALLICDATA ELECTRONICS LIMITED to get more information