In determining what type of cloud storage and backup solution is best for business needs and requirements, leaders should focus on three core areas of evaluation: application support, cloud data lock-in, and speed and cost of access. Scality’s chief product officer Paul Speciale explains how the right solutions that meet these criteria can boost security, business continuity, and digital organizations’ connectivity.
2020 was a banner year for cloud services adoption, driven largely by the massive shift to remote and hybrid work scenarios as a result of the pandemic. And 2021 shows no sign of slowing down that growth. According to Gartner, Inc, worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services is forecast to grow 18.4% in 2021 to a total of $304.9 billion, up from $257.5 billion in 2020.
The extreme data growth problem is drowning enterprises in big data and is often described with the three Vs of “volume, variety and velocity.” This is demanding new data storage and management solutions to scale, protect, ensure availability, simplify management and lower the cost of delivering this data to the business.
As businesses have become increasingly reliant on cloud services, cloud storage is being recognized as a key aspect, crucial for highly valuable data assets. Here are the top three considerations when selecting a cloud storage and backup solution for your business.
1. Application Support and Cloud Storage
Most organizations ascribe mission-critical status to their business applications and data. There have been increasing numbers of independent software vendors in data backup, collaboration, big data analytics, and even vertical, industry-specific areas such as healthcare that now embrace cloud storage.
In the cloud technology stack, a transition occurs in the application development space, where traditional enterprise (monolithic) applications are being replaced by more modular and agile microservices and cloud-based applications, deployed in containers and on Kubernetes. Traditional applications are built for static storage systems, block arrays and fixed-file system mount points accessed within the local proximity and latencies of the data center.
However, cloud-based applications can run anywhere and anytime and benefit from a stateless storage architecture based on RESTful protocols on the internet, accessing cloud and object stores that house unstructured data as objects, consisting of data and metadata attributes. Organizations should carefully consider their applications based on how effectively they can be deployed flexibly, in the cloud or on bare-metal servers, and how well they can integrate with cloud storage services.
Learn More: How to Build Business Resilience With Multi-Region Cloud Desktops
2. Cloud Data Lock-In
Concerns about getting locked into a specific cloud vendor are warranted. The number of applications supporting the most popular cloud services has increased as the popularity of cloud storage soars. It’s best to look for applications that have embraced a multi-cloud data strategy to ensure freedom is maintained. Multi-cloud data management solutions now exist that can separate applications from specific cloud storage services so that customers can choose to avoid cloud vendor lock-in.
3. Speed and Cost of Access
Speed and cost are two significant elements of data access to cloud services that organizations need to consider. In terms of speed, it is key to understand the service-level agreements (SLAs) of cloud storage services. Usually, the lower the cost of storage, the more the storage service can relax its promises on the speed of access. This is particularly true in very low-cost cloud archive storage, where the SLA for data access is measured in hours.
In terms of cost, cloud storage services not only include the amount of data stored in the cloud (capacity pricing), but the truly hidden fees are related to accessing the data. Most cloud services will not charge for data writing “in” to the cloud but impose extensive fees for reading data “out” of the cloud. These “data egress” fees can often add significantly to the monthly costs of cloud storage.
Many enterprises also consider on-premises “private clouds” as a practical solution to these performance and data transfer cost challenges. Private clouds offer many advantages in terms of localized control and access performance for applications that can also run on-premises. Most of today’s leading backup management solutions also provide the flexibility to be deployed in these environments.
Learn More: What Is Cloud Storage: Private, Public, Hybrid and Community Cloud Storage
Overcoming Storage Challenges
Today’s ongoing avalanche of data growth creates enormous challenges for companies who now have to manage petabytes of data and beyond. The task at hand is to solve data storage and management problems at large scale. Traditional Network Attached Storage (NAS) & Storage Area Networks (SAN) solutions were not designed with this level of scale in mind, nor were they built for the era of cloud and round-the-clock operations across the world.
The key considerations for businesses adopting cloud storage and backup solutions include application support, cloud data lock-in, and the speed and cost of access to data. Look for flexibility and integration options for applications and multi-cloud data management solutions to prevent lock-in. Check cloud storage services’ SLAs to ensure the needed speed is available, and check for data egress and any other hidden fees to avoid unpleasant surprises on the monthly cloud bill. Finding solutions that meet these criteria will help boost security, business continuity, and connectivity for digital organizations.
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