Five teach you how to choose cloud storage provider's features

In the past decade, has been plagued IT companies, but also will die IT companies have always wanted to break is the storage island. As businesses begin to embrace hybrid cloud deployments, storage silos are determined to rise due to the lack of visualization of cloud storage. Yet one cloud storage provider offers solid management capabilities while the other offers almost the same functionality. In this article, we mainly talk about which points need to be taken into consideration when considering public cloud or hybrid storage deployment.

The so-called "Knowledge Liberation Labor" is right and wrong. On the one hand, it is important and difficult to keep a close eye on storage locations, the cost, what happened, and what trends to forecast. Much like storage managers handle storage in the datacenter, cloud storage appears and masks large amounts of data. In the emerging hybrid data center, storage management tools remain important for providing insight into data in close quarters. Conversely, this way we can also move data to a more suitable location, reducing the use of providers. The simplest (and cheapest) cloud storage provider may offer few storage management portals or dashboards.

In some cases, these are limited by the window hierarchy of the disk hierarchy and the file directory. This may be enough from the point of view of users accessing the simple file registration library. However, this does not give IT groups a mature view of data types, growth rates, and cost controls. Although these providers may say that their services are provided to businesses, they may be more time-consuming consumers. Enterprise-level vendors provide reporting mechanisms or portals that provide customers with the insight to store registrars. Most of the time, these are limited to physical-level metrics such as consumption (capacity, bandwidth, etc.), uptime, or other service-level agreement metrics. These are all key metrics needed for billing and governance, but do little to manage storage more effectively. In the data center, many IT organizations have implemented a large number of storage management systems to consolidate storage, predict demand, optimize capacity, and deliver performance. As a result, there is a clear gap between the storage management delivered by cloud providers and the management of internal capabilities. From a practical point of view, this also led to the storage island, managers were forced to deal with each type of independent storage. These hide the business case costs behind the public (hybrid) cloud deployments. Hybrid storage management is still in its early stages of development, but its rapid growth. Until these capabilities mature, IT organizations should increase management integration when choosing cloud storage providers to specify assessment criteria. The early integration points focused on authentication and global access control, but gradually evolved to include a unified view of mixed physical identities. This integration enables the collection and reporting of cloud related data through third party software vendors' application programming interfaces (APIs). In future cloud vendor evaluations, IT managers can use the following features as their focus: • Authentication integration (eg, Active Directory, Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) • Key encryption management (important if off-site data is classified as confidential) • API availability and adoption by third-party storage management providers • Storage management panels, SLA monitoring and key performance indicators • Capacity forecasting and optimization, cost analysis, and data protection analytics In the short term, few cloud providers can deliver these foundations Content. However, providers should have a solid roadmap that can be clearly articulated. The market may develop, but market leaders still look forward to customer needs.

【Editor's Choice】

Cloud Storage 2013 and 2014 Addressing the Challenge of Hybrid Cloud Security with Encryption How to Design a Public Cloud Application for a Hybrid Cloud Future? Cloud Storage Management: Balanced Cloud and Internal Data Relations [Editor: Iris Wei TEL: (010) 68476606]