Cloud Storage-as-a-Service: The new approach to mass capacity data storage and management
Businesses today need a new approach for improving their data storage and management — not only to fuel their digital transformation but also to proactively derive more value from data.
Storage, management, protection, and valuation of data across industries have all become critical business requirements, more so in the new remote reality. This is likely to continue well into the near future, with cloud adoption increasing among businesses. As organisations — big and small — continue to collect and leverage data at an ever-increasing rate, they require new ways to discover actionable information in that data.
Competitive organisations must adopt a new 'digital alchemy' that can empower them to collect, store, and analyse vast volumes of data. Additionally, strong demand for cloud data centers and ongoing recovery is pushing large scale investments and growing use of AI and analytics to support digital transformation in businesses worldwide.
This is substantiated by IDC's latest Future-Proofing Storage whitepaper, commissioned by Seagate Technology. The paper is based on surveys in which most respondents considered it increasingly important to co-locate data adjacent to applications or cloud services.
What's obstructing efficient data storage and management?
There are several challenges pertaining to data storage and management. First: valuable data being discarded by businesses in the absence of efficient cloud storage.
According to the Future-Proofing Storage paper, limited performance, complexity of management, and lack of integration with cloud are three of the leading technical shortcomings of current storage infrastructure solutions. Seventy-eight per cent of survey respondents use physical data transport/migration solutions because data transfer over their networks could no longer keep up with capacity.
Another concern is high ingress and egress fees. IT architects who manage public, private, edge, and hybrid cloud infrastructures should deploy storage solutions that offer optimum performance at the lowest possible cost. In this report, IDC has indicated that 99% of cloud storage users incur planned or unplanned egress fees, affecting companies' total cost of ownership (TCO).
Enter cloud storage-as-a-service
To resolve these issues, cloud storage-as-a-service has emerged as an effective solution. The flexible object storage cloud solution for mass data allows organisations to complement existing cloud strategies and unlock the value of their massive unstructured datasets.
It provides a simple, trusted, secure, and cost-efficient cloud storage solution at the metro edge, closer to where data is generated, which reduces latency. Metro edges, located between micro and macro edges, comprises enterprise-hardened systems and devices that aggregate, distribute, and process data from sensors and devices — often handling real-time workloads.
Connectivity to data sources is facilitated to various edge- and cloud-based applications, which allows businesses to store more data with faster time to value. Time taken by users to retrieve data from data warehouses is significantly shortened. In addition, the storage-as-a-service cloud lets enterprises store and activate their data at scale.
The storage-as-a-service cloud is designed for 99.9% availability, meaning organisations can access data at any time alongside 24×7 support for analytics. It enables easy transfer and input of mass data into the cloud and provides simple pricing and zero add-on charges or egress fees. This makes it easier for businesses to store and move data out without any unexpected costs. It also improves TCO, allowing businesses to scale storage capacities without limits.
Immutable object storage from the storage-as-a-service cloud protects data from attacks, while multi-zone replication assures that data is available when required. Businesses can further safeguard data with ransomware protection, enterprise-grade identity management support, automatic data replication, and data encryption.
Businesses are looking for cloud solutions that scale without limits and deploy best-in-class efficient storage as a service to enable storage, access, and retrieval of potentially useful data. Storage-as-a-service cloud platforms for mass-capacity private clouds are the way forward.
In today's dynamic business environment, the storage-as-a-service cloud solution for multicloud deployments will be critical to ensuring higher availability of data and resilience to site failure to deliver fast, simple, and secure edge storage and data transfers that accelerate time to insights.
