Learn all about storage in the cloud and tips on how you can cut infrastructure investments, as well as offload power, cooling and the carbon footprint to a cloud storage services provider. But before outsourcing storage to the cloud, you need to be assured that your data will be available, secure and ready to satisfy regulatory requirements. Read on to learn why a successful cloud storage implementation depends on trusting the market, ferreting out the hidden costs of storage clouds and asking questions to determine if cloud storage is right for your IT infrastructure.
Cloud
storage success depends on trust
For organisations looking to outsource their data storage, cloud storage is a cost-effective
alternative to the complexities of in-house storage provisioning. Moving data to
the cloud offloads storage management tasks such as managing RAID levels, migrating data
between storage tiers, maintaining disk drives and running replication, snapshot and backup
practices. But while there are many good use
cases for cloud storage, success depends on your trust in a cloud storage provider.
Cloud
storage pricing revealed: Hidden costs include data migration and access fees
While moving data to the cloud can help organisations save on storage management costs, few
providers actually mention that basic storage costs are only part of the picture. Therefore many
organisations often overlook data migration costs as well as fees for storage, data access and
portable device handling. But a lot has happened with cloud
storage pricing, features and offerings, and cloud storage providers now offer tools that
estimate monthly costs. This tip takes a closer look at cloud storage
pricing and examines possible hidden fees.
Is
cloud data storage right for your IT infrastructure?
While the benefits
of cloud storage are pretty appealing in a vacuum, no two storage infrastructures are the same.
Therefore, it is important for storage managers to know the right questions to ask potential
service providers to determine how storage clouds will impact their environment. Before migrating
data to the cloud, it important to determine if cloud storage costs will rise based on user
activity, if data at rest needs encryption or if the cloud storage service provider can put an
appliance on site. This tip examines the questions you should ask cloud storage service providers
to determine if a cloud
infrastructure is right for your environment.
This was first published in March 2010
