The main problems that cloud storage currently faces

The main problems that cloud storage faces today are broadband bottlenecks, security, availability, and infrastructure

Cloud storage is currently facing a major problem of 1. Broadband bottlenecks.

Given that the gap between broadband promotion and data growth has worsened over the past 20 years, broadband is likely to be the biggest impediment to the spread of cloud storage as a standard commercial application. For typical individual consumers, Internet broadband from 28.8k modem to 5Mbps or so, the increase of more than 170 times times. But at the same time the growth in data has risen from an average of about 100MB per user to more than 1TB, an increase of more than 10,000 times times. With the widening of the gap, the feasibility of external storage (offsite storage) as the main data storage path is getting smaller.

Cloud storage is currently facing a major problem of 2. Security and availability.

In addition to broadband, other restrictive factors, including reliability and security, cannot be overlooked on the agenda. Migrating data to the cloud causes enterprise users to be highly constrained by their cloud storage server providers in terms of data security and availability. It is very difficult for many enterprises to migrate their data to the cloud. It can be said that security and usability concerns are the paramount factors in the enterprise's approach to cloud storage.

One is the lack of control over the connectivity of cloud storage or cloud computing resources on the network. As a result, users assume that all transmitted data may be intercepted or changed. As a result, any sensitive information such as login IDs and passwords should be protected. This security issue is now a cloud service, typically provided by e-mail and CRM main applications.

In the past, security meant perimeter security, ensuring that unauthorized access was not allowed around the perimeter. In a virtual world, through virtual IT services, a physical perimeter has ceased to exist. Therefore, the enterprise must assume that all transmitted data may be potentially intercepted. There is no physical control on a system, and the execution of these rules must rely on other methods to restrict access to information. Encryption is an important way to restrict access to meaningful information. As a result, encryption becomes an important component of security when it services are delivered through the cloud. The problem with cloud storage is challenging because data must be stored and saved in encrypted form. If the encryption key itself is lost or corrupted, the data itself is lost or damaged accordingly.

Cloud storage is currently facing a major problem of 3. Infrastructure.

Performance does not necessarily require the higher the better, but has a variety of performance areas for users to choose from, but basically to meet the lower latency, the early cloud computing platform due to the neglect of the back-end storage investment in a relatively large number of IO latency. In addition, 70% of the stored data is static and rarely even accessed again, and businesses can save costs by settling the data into lower-cost media through automated ILM (Information Lifecycle Management). In order to do this, you must use a policy-based block-level ILM approach, volume-level and file-level automatic migration can not achieve the desired effect, only granular granularity to the block level, it is possible to apply to the needs of the corresponding. The importance of data protection is not to say that for storage, data security is the first, especially for enterprise users.

To solve the above three problems, cloud storage is also adapted to the needs of the commercial information repository. The initial backup can be done within the appliance, or it can be backed up on cloud storage for data protection outside the appliance.

(Responsible editor: Lu Guang)