Five strokes to teach you to choose the most suitable cloud storage provider

While many businesses are migrating applications and other processes to the cloud, businesses are still favoring local models for data backup and storage. Onsite storage appears to be safe and easy to control, but costly to manage and makes businesses vulnerable to natural disaster attacks.

In addition, bottlenecks are often formed in local mode, especially in the process of consolidating remote and local applications and assets.

Today, many companies already plan to use the cloud to store data. But in the face of a variety of cloud storage vendors, you must carefully ask the following questions before you choose to ensure that valuable digital assets are managed efficiently and efficiently.

1. Are all files and backups permanent (and fast) effective?

Availability is critical if your business is using the cloud as the primary storage for files and backups. Nhan Nguyen, chief scientist and CTO of CIC, believes that fast access to documents under any circumstances is the cornerstone of satisfying customer service needs.

CIC is committed to providing electronic signature solutions for highly time-sensitive financial services industries. Therefore, CIC's technicians must ensure that their cloud storage solutions meet both the availability and high speed access features, just as local storage does.

"The number of simultaneous online users (concurrent users) We support is very high," he explains. It is our primary goal to ensure a high percentage of online time and to ensure that users complete the download of documents within three seconds. ”

CIC needs a solution that meets the above objectives and customer SLAs (Service level agreements). After a few inquiries, they decided to deploy the common Distributed File System Glusterfs of open source storage company Gluster as a complement to the existing cloud computing infrastructure.

Leveraging Glusterfs,cic enables consolidation and virtualization of existing Amazon Network Service (AWS) resilient block Storage (EBS). In addition, with synchronous and asynchronous replication, files can recover quickly and even exceed customer expectations.

2. Can existing solutions keep up with future growth requirements?

Kania, chief executive of the managed ERP provider software link, says cloud computing can meet growing storage requirements.

Kania said: "Using local disk storage on the server becomes difficult to control and unsustainable in operation, especially after we virtualize our infrastructure." At the same time, we need to store more and more data. "Software Link currently has more than 2,000 customers, and this number is increasing. Faced with a huge customer base, Kania and his team found solutions through the storage provider Coraid Company.

Coraid's etherdrive platform not only supports fast storage, but also helps users add new storage on demand, which provides the possibility to meet the increasing storage requirements of software link.

Kania further said: "We chose Coraid because Coraid provides high levels of storage virtualization and data availability, which is necessary for us to successfully expand our business." ”

Currently, Software Link can host more applications, and storage speeds are increasing. When they need additional storage space, they can configure additional etherdrive platforms, and the entire process can be achieved in just a few minutes.

3. Is the solution suitable for existing applications and infrastructures?

For software link and CIC, consolidating storage solutions to existing applications and infrastructure is a critical step. Currently, two companies are looking for complementary solutions to accommodate existing workflows.

"We are looking for solutions to adapt to the current application." "said Kania. Kania's company mainly offers Sage's ERP solutions and QuickBooks SMB (SME) solutions.

For Nyguen and its CIC employees, a streamlined transition from existing storage to "cloud" storage is an urgent requirement. CIC has chosen the Rightscale Cloud management platform as the basis for its operations. In addition, CIC has also deployed Amazon's EBS (Elastic block store, resilient blocks storage).

As Nyguen said: "It is vital that you choose a cloud storage solution without changing our existing infrastructure." ”

4. Is the solution safe?

2011 is more disasters, is a natural disaster and disastrous weather frequency of a year, various disaster losses set a new record.

Earthquakes, fires, floods, tornadoes and other disaster events in the world, to many communities and enterprises caused by the indelible impact.

In such a situation, Veronica Barnes, the technical director of Dedham Town (Dedham) in Massachusetts (Massachusetts), has expressed concern about the future, particularly the dangers of the disaster. The town of Dedham still uses local backup, and there are potential security risks as data is not adequately protected.

"The recent disasters in America have caused me a sense of urgency. Barnes frankly.

To this end, Zetta is looking for a solution to cloud storage service provider, designed to achieve offsite (off-site) backup of critical data. Zettamirror helps users access on demand, and then automatically copies and synchronizes local data. Data is transmitted and stored in an encrypted format, and the current copy can be accessed through a Web browser or directly through a remote file system, and is permanently available.

Although there have been no natural disasters in the town of Zetta, which means that the solution has not yet been used, the existence of the solution has finally brought comfort to the town and its IT staff. As Barnes said: "Zetta helped us subtract a lot of pressure." Once upon a time, we had to work late into the night and always worried about the safety of data. ”

Software Link's Kania that he believes there is growing demand for data protection in the face of frequent disasters. "You want to find such a data center: stay away from natural disasters, data is protected, data security is no longer a concern." ”

5. Can the solution generate ROI?

In general, the reason why enterprises migrate to the "cloud", cost savings is a big driving force. For storage, a solid return on investment is undoubtedly one of the considerations, but not necessarily the most important factor.

Yes, your CEO is likely to have an extraordinary demand for Rio, but CIOs and IT managers will tell the truth that not every advantage can be reflected in Rio's calculations, which is one example of cloud storage.

On this issue, independent IT architecture advisor JP Morgentha a great summary in recent blog posts:

"Cloud computing is an efficient use of computing resources, and cloud computing provides agility and flexibility to my business in a cost-effective way." I'm not investing in cloud computing, I'm enjoying the service. Do you consider ROI when you are eating McDonald's or washing your car? You obviously don't, because the service is not equal to the investment, all enjoy the service regardless of the return on investment. Therefore, the use of services is to the relevant cash flow effective use, without the need to use their own resources and assets. ”

Disaster recovery is a must for cloud storage to keep up with the fast-moving computing environment. In fact, disaster recovery has been applied to many industries. Employees are working more and more hours at home or in remote areas. For some important tasks, enterprises take the outsourcing model, and provide partners and contractors with access to digital assets. Previously, these tasks were done within the enterprise.

In short, cloud storage consolidates all of these benefits into a single service. Although these advantages may be difficult to quantify, they bring tangible value to the enterprise. Isn't that the embodiment of Rio in the first place?

Perhaps we can make an analogy to better illustrate the problem. Suppose you are specially equipped with a box of repair tools to repair the transmission of the car, but is this really necessary? You know, today's repairman has special diagnostic tools, expensive elevators and other series of equipment. A lot of professional services are actually the case, such as cloud storage.

So why do you bother and choose to store yourself when you can easily enjoy the service?