Pros and cons of cloud storage

易扩展性和按次付费使用的价格是两个平企业云存储的。潜在的缺点包括管理的复杂性和安全性的担忧。

Ivanastar / Getty Images / Sam Schooler

似乎一切都迁移到云计算,这些天,所以怎么样的存储?是时候拔掉那些昂贵的数据中心存储设备和迁移所有数据到云?2020欧洲杯预赛

The answer: It's more complicated than you might think.

而云存储提供了许多优势-premises data storage – scalability at the push of a button (up or down), accessibility from any device at any location, pay-per-usage pricing – there are some potential drawbacks as well.

Security and privacy issues inevitably come up when enterprises consider whether to entrust a public cloud services provider with information that could be damaging to the company in the event of a data breach. Performance is another issue, particularly when it comes to applications that require low latency. Managing data when it's locked up in your data center is by definition easier than managing data scattered across multiple geographic availability zones of a single cloud storage provider, or even scattered across multiple providers. And vendor lock-in is certainly a concern when you're talking about moving terabytes of data.

David Friend, CEO and co-founder of cloud storage vendor芥末技术, estimates that around 80% of enterprise storage is still on-premises, but he predicts that within 10 years, most data will be in the public cloud. "The business of running a storage farm yourself makes less and less sense," Friend says. IDC analyst Andrew Smith agrees. "The expectation is that more and more capacity will be stored in the public cloud," he says.

According to联合市场调研,云存储市场在2019年是$ 46十亿,预计以每年超过20%的速度增长,由2027年Inkwood研究涉及到了类似的结论一流的$ 222十亿,预测的19.75%,2020年2028年间的增长速度。

When it comes to the primary storage that is linked to specific workloads, storage follows the application, whether the app moves from an enterprise data center to a private cloud or public cloud environment, says Henry Baltazar, a storage analyst at451研究. "At the end of the day, storage is a secondary element to the application," says Baltazar.

Where it gets interesting is the opportunity to migrate backup data, archived data and even disaster recovery functionality to the public cloud. For enterprises investigating a strategic move to cloud storage, here are some of the pros and cons that should be taken into consideration.

Cloud storage advantages

Cost cutting:Acquiring cloud storage on an 'only-pay-for-what-you-use model' is cheaper than shelling out millions for your own storage hardware that you have to maintain and upgrade. In fact, Smith says that as the competition has heated up between the main cloud storage providers – Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM – prices have continued to plummet. "There's a pretty obvious race to the bottom on price in terms of public cloud storage."

可扩展性:在意外或计划外的业务需要时间的能力,以获取更多的数据存储容量可以救星的公司。同样,企业可以快速,轻松地缩减了下来。与公共云的几乎无限的存储容量进场时,公司开始考虑创建数据的湖泊,使他们能够运用人工智能物联网数据或其他大型数据集。史密斯说,数据湖情景仍然是“新生”,但他预计,这将获得新的动力随着时间的推移。

无障碍:云存储使最终用户能够访问和共享数据的任何设备上无论身在何处,他们都在工作。这种类型的连接性可以提高协作效率和业务敏捷性。

Offsite management/maintenance:No matter how well you maintain your storage assets, disks crash, components fail, appliances go down. In an on-prem scenario, that's an emergency the IT department has to tackle. In a cloud scenario, it's Amazon's problem.

不断更新:Organizations with on-prem storage hardware have to watch their devices age and become obsolete. Cloud storage companies are constantly providing updates as part of the normal course of business.

Backup benefits:Backing up data has always been important for business continuity, but it has taken on increased urgency in the age of ransomware attacks that encrypt data and demand money to unlock that data. Most large enterprises back up their data at a secondary data center, but cloud storage provides a low-cost alternative that eliminates the need for companies to maintain redundant facilities and enables companies to restore their data without paying a ransom.

Disaster recovery:DR involves maintaining a mirror image of the production environment at a different location, so that it can be activated in the event of a disaster. Instead of owning and operating a secondary DR site, which might never be needed, putting DR in the cloud is an enticing prospect. The tricky part is figuring out whether to do-it-yourself, to go with a DR-as-a-Service offering from cloud services providers like Azure and IBM, or to work with third-party DRaaS vendors like iLand or Recovery Point.

Baltazar says that once companies realize that they can stand up servers and storage at the touch of a button in the cloud, they can begin to use cloud-based DR as a way to run production workloads in cases where the main data center might be running out of capacity. And eventually, DR can provide workload mobility. "The future is going to be about choosing the right execution venue based on the requirements of the business," he says.

Cloud storage challenges

定价gotchas: Yes, cloud storage is cheap, but nailing down exactly what your costs will be in order to do accurate budgeting and forecasting isn't all that easy. Storage falls into three large buckets, hot storage or active data that needs to be accessed frequently, cool storage or data that needs to be accessed infrequently, and cold storage, which is inactive archived data that is being kept for compliance or regulatory reasons.

The complexity comes in when organizations have to decide between Amazon's six storage tiers (Standard, Intelligent, Standard Infrequent Access, One-Zone Infrequent Access, Glacier and Glacier Deep Archive.) Similarly, Microsoft Azure has four tiers and Google has five tiers, with prices decreasing as one moves to the colder forms of storage.

Then there are additional costs that organizations might not have anticipated. For example, the cloud vendors charge for data access (get requests and put requests) and data movement (egress charges). Business requirements change all the time, so companies may find themselves needing to access data that they once thought was stagnant, which translates into additional fees that the company had not planned on, Smith says.

现在有第三方厂商谁可以帮助企业进行分类的数据,确保它在适当的层次,甚至“修剪”,企图控制成本的数据随着时间的推移结束。

Security and privacy concerns:Cloud service providers have made a determined effort to assuage those concerns, but security is still the No. 1 worry among enterprise customers, according to IDC surveys. Smith points out that service providers are now offering a broad range of security-related features, including data encryption, SLAs, multiple ‘9s' of availability, the ability to track sensitive data, etc. But auditors and compliance officers remain wary, especially in regions subject to GDPR or similar regulations.

Management complexity:As companies begin to move data to the cloud, or to multiple clouds, they are faced with the task of managing across a hybrid cloud environment, which can be a challenge. First off, IT staffers might not have the right skills to be doing things like checking to see that SLAs are being met, or tracking the reasons for escalating usage costs. Smith says many enterprises end up buying third-party cloud storage management tools from vendors such as Veeam, Commvault and Zerto.

The good news is that the incumbent storage hardware vendors (NetApp, Dell/EMC, IBM, HPE, etc.) are offering software overlays that integrate an enterprise's on-prem storage with its cloud volumes in order to create a single management platform across a multi-cloud environment. "That model is resonating with customers," says Smith.

He adds that most enterprise have wisely decided not to spread their storage across multiple service providers, unless there's a specific use case. For example, companies might use AWS for their CRM applications and Azure for email. But they would be unlikely to have CRM data in more than one cloud.

厂商锁定:在实践中,可以从字面上需要几个月的时间对于一个企业在一个典型的互联网连接,大容量的数据移动到云中。“它仍然是痛苦的移动大量的数据,”朋友说。因此,可以想象,过程相反,如果一个组织想从一个云存储供应商删除其数据。不仅如此,在很多情况下都需要企业进行为期三年的承诺。甚至有那么凉爽和冷库的“过早删除”罚款。

Performance: There's no way to get around it – accessing data housed in an on-prem data center, or even an edge data center, will always be faster than accessing data from the cloud. The question then becomes which applications absolutely require low latency and which can live with a bit of delay. Global companies also need to do their research to make sure that the cloud provider has availability zones in all of the geographic areas in which the company does business.

底线:存储需求的不断增加,多数公司想下车即到昂贵的存储硬件更新周期。但要注意所涉及的移动存储到公共云的复杂性是非常重要的。

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