How far can cloud storage go?

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 becoming a dynamic technology model, says Daryl Plummer, Gartner's vice president of management. "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 been increasingly visible in recent weeks, touted as "silver bullet" (a solution to all the problems) that can address the limitations of the user's hardware and skills.





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





Still, cloud services remain a new technology, and some analysts warn that it still takes "many years" before cloud services are fully mature.





"By 2010, the chaotic cloud of cloud services will be gradually removed, replaced by competitive services among suppliers and 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, which had been compromised by blackouts, had a serious impact on 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. "





Although all the talk focuses on cloud-storage wrinkles, Gartner is not the only analyst to highlight the challenges of cloud storage, and in recent forecasts, Enterprise Strategy Group ESG Analysts 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.