Cloud Storage: Organizations Weigh Pros versus Cons

To use cloud storage, or not to.  What’s driving enterprises to decide one way or the other?

In mid-2011, based on a survey from TheInfoPro, less than 10 percent of Fortune 1000 companies had any plans for storing data in the cloud, even the lowest-tier data for archival or other non-sensitive data.  Enterprises have worries around performance/latency and bandwidth costs, not to mention security and reliability.  Marco Coulter, research director of storage at TheInfoPro, explained that “Most of the large enterprises…say that we’re just not giving our data out to somebody else…  Performance still comes up in the commentary, as well. The problem is when you need the data back…there isn’t a high level of confidence that they can do that through an external system.”

Less than a year after that report, have things really changed?  George Crump in a commentary on InformationWeek is of the opinion that the move to the cloud by large enterprises may not be happening yet, but that move is inevitable.  Given the fast growth of unstructured data, enterprises won’t be able to handle all of the data by themselves.  Crump writes that “No longer can rich media simply be wiped from data center storage systems, since in many cases this data has a legitimate purpose and value to the organization…  Conventional storage systems may not be able to deliver the economics required to keep pace with the rate of unstructured data growth…  These storage systems are going to need to be scalable, affordable, and utilize capacity as well as data protection efficiently.”

To better accommodate the needs of enterprises, Crump predicts that increasingly object-based storage will be used in the public clouds to enable quicker queries and granular search across cloud-based storage.  He also suggests that in order to address the problem of data latency that increasingly data caching strategies will be developed that cache active frequently used data on local storage devices with the complete data set managed and maintained externally in the cloud.

Crump concludes that  “as data centers become larger, their capabilities to singularly deal with unstructured data may be untenable and, as a result, they will need to leverage a model where they have maximum scalability locally and unlimited scalability remotely.”