Analyzing the challenges of cloud storage

Cloud storage is the next big thing to focus on, but analysts warn that it is not without challenges.

Cloud computing will become the most influential e-business business model in the next few years. This week, analysts at Gartner, the analyst, made a bold prediction that analysts expect more storage services to emerge from the current Internet cloud and become a large e-commerce service.

Many companies are now crossing the "threshold" of communication using the Internet and then becoming a dynamic technology model, says Daryl Plummer, a vice president of management at Gartner. "We are really starting to move towards an economy that is based on every consumer that needs to be stored, Whether it's calculated data, video or financial statements. The vice president expressed that idea in a statement this week.

Cloud services, which allow users to store and access data over the Internet, have become increasingly visible in recent weeks, touted as a "silver bullet" (a solution to all the problems) that address the limitations of the user's hardware and skills.

A range of vendors, including EMC and Amazon (S3 services), have thrown their own plays behind the cloud storage, and Gartner expects more companies to launch similar technologies.

Still, cloud-storage services remain an emerging technology, and some analysts warn that it still takes "many years" before cloud services are fully mature.

"By 2010, the chaos that surrounds the cloud services will be gradually removed, replacing the excellent service that competition between suppliers and the powerful services from search to identification and even the core of the enterprise infrastructure." Plummer wrote in a report.

However, Gartner believes that before that, users need to take some key factors into account in order to truly access internet-based services.

These measures include finding out that moving to web-based storage can affect contracts with existing IT vendors and how to determine whether cloud services are strong enough to meet specific business goals.

Earlier in the years, Amazon's S3 services had been shut down due to blackouts, which posed a serious blow to the reliability of cloud storage.

"To assess the benefits of using cloud-based services, the Organization must also identify relevant business and security risks." "The organization needs to assess issues such as risk, such as how to ensure the integrity of the data, privacy, and the need to understand electronic discovery, compliance, audit reports, etc.," Plummer said.

"While all the talk focuses on cloud-storage wrinkles, Gartner is not the only analyst to highlight the challenges of cloud storage," said the analysts of ESG, an enterprise Strategy Group, who in recent forecasts believe that corporate users are most likely to use cloud storage services in testing and development, This will be before the cloud storage service is used in the production system within the enterprise.

(Responsible editor: Lu Guang)