There are organizations that have taken cloud storage services as businesses to take control of the customer data and ensure that the data is made accessible over the organizations’ network
Cloud storage is often based on utility storage model. The cloud storage service is made flexible and organizations can access more services as it works on pay-as-you-go pricing and scalability. The cloud storage vendors provide the organizations with the capability to adjust the capacity of storage as per the demands.
Cloud storage service includes disaster recovery, file sharing, archiving, back up, primary data storage, etc.
Amazon web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform are some of the Cloud vendors that offers a range of cloud services offering SSD-based capacity, high performance, long latency archive storage at prices marked from high to low. Most of the applications require a variety I/O needs, it can be updates on latency-sensitive metadata to backups. It is important to understand that almost all the cloud storage services do not stand a complete solution.
Application developers alter their code to outplay the shortfalls of cloud storage. The two major issues are performance/cost tradeoffs and inelastic implementation.
COST/PERFORMANCE TRADEOFFS
The levels of storage hierarchy creates an impact on tradeoffs – quick and instant storage is very expensive and cheap storage capability is very slow.
Enterprises shift data in an adaptive way, moving fast data to quick caches and transferring cool data to disk and it sometimes move the data to the cloud archive. However, it is challenging to store data in the cloud archive, as each services demand as each service has to be deployed by means of a specific protocol.
INELASTIC DEPLOYMENT
The cloud storage is good to go with only single metric elasticity. The AWS S3 service focuses on the scalability of the capacity but does work well with I/O demand while DynamoDB is scalable with I/O demand but when it comes to low-latency configurations it works out to be more expensive.
Public vs. private vs. hybrid services
Cloud storage services that are owned/operated by a provider are called public cloud storage services. It is mostly suitable for data that is unstructured and does not require any changes.
The cloud infrastructure includes storage nodes that are a part of the commodity drives. Data is stored on many nodes and can be accessed through the internet protocols. The public cloud storage service is designed and developed to support multiple clients with isolation of data, accessing of data and to ensure customer security.
Private Cloud Storage services ensure data security and address the challenges incurred due to public cloud storage when it is deployed by a specific organization.
Private cloud storage is mostly in demand when an organization’s data requires strict control system to manage actively used confidential data. The cloud storage is on a committed environment within the data center that assures performance and security.
However, some organizations require a hybrid cloud storage to archive unstructured data for storing purposes. For instance, they would require a public cloud storage to store less-sensitive data and the private cloud storage to ensure secure storage of confidential and structured data.
Consider the following factors while choosing to implement a cloud storage service
Does the cloud storage service deploy the most generic Application Programming Platform called representational state transfer (REST)
Are you shifting data from an existing stored product
Does your data needs to stored in a particular format in par with the compliance demands
Can the provider manage to handle inconsistency in resource demands
Does the provider facilitate both public and private cloud services
Pros and Cons of Cloud Storage
Private cloud storage is highly reliable and secure however, there is a limited scope of scalability and demands maintenance and in-house resources.
Public cloud storage assures scalability and it works on pay-as-you-go model without affecting the on-premise storage infrastructure. Nevertheless the level of security and performance is based in the availability of the internet connectivity and service provider.
Organizations benefit the best of private and public through hybrid cloud storage with assurance on scalability and easy on-premise integration that adds upto multiple levels of security.
Recovery and performance
- Choose the right type of cloud storage service that suits your organization’s demands.
- Measure and monitor the availability and performance
- Adjust to the operation of the cloud storage service
- Consider using the hybrid approach
- Enhance connectivity