Cloud storage Five questions-how do I choose a cloud storage solution?

When the industry sings the mantra of "moving towards the clouds," storage vendors jump in and want to get a piece of it, but for the business, it's not easy to tell the hype and its real business value, but to assess whether the cloud storage is right for your business, and if so, which manufacturer's products to choose from, It is a key process to properly review providers, and cloud storage is now being used commercially on a large scale, but it is important for vendors to provide enterprise-class services to secure and effectively apply these technologies successfully to small and medium-sized enterprises, and even to large enterprises.

Where is your data stored?

First, the key is to determine where your data is stored when you upload data to the cloud, for two reasons for its importance: security and performance. For many companies, their data should be within the boundaries of some countries to meet compliance needs, and PCI DSS and many other standards are dependent on this.

Performance is another reason to focus on location, one advantage of cloud storage is the friendly support for mobile office, where you can access authorized data from countless devices, collaborate with your colleagues, no longer need a SAN to support your work, and if the storage node is close to your office, You should experience good storage services. Before making a final selection, you can get a lot of useful information by doing some simple performance testing.

How is the data protected?

Anyway, the data will always go through the dark Internet, where there are malicious people everywhere, so enterprise cloud storage vendors should provide high strength encryption in data transmission and static, some use AES or SSL encryption, and some vendors use hardware-based VPN, Even established a very secure MPLS private link.

What level of facilities are used?

It is important to review security at the software level, but what kind of physical environment does your data reside in? SAS Type II and SSAE 16 are two common certifications, in addition to ensuring that storage DCs are reviewed with the highest standards of redundancy, connectivity and security, it is recommended to investigate their HR screening procedures, access control of buildings, and proximity to natural or man-made disaster areas, which can be accessed through industry forums, Blogs and related analyst research.

Has the price fallen with your size?

Scalability is another professional term in the cloud community that you can expand according to the needs of your organization and only pay for the resources that you do use, but the question is, does it make sense that the business is growing?

The most important thing is to read the most difficult provisions in the contract, such as whether the data upload and download the additional charges.

What APIs are used?

API is the biggest obstacle for many companies, vendor lock-in is a very realistic problem, many times it will cause problems, such as inconsistent API will cause data can not be transmitted, the REST API so quickly become the industry standard, but some providers can support multiple different types of APIs.

Commercial cloud products are now everywhere, considering several of the issues listed in this article will help you find the best enterprise-class cloud storage products, and cloud storage is a very promising technology that can be used properly to drive SMB and large enterprises to a new level