Cloud Integrated Storage – Advantages & Challenges

Cloud is the most powerful and cost-effective way to address data explosion challenges. It should just not be used as a vast, inexpensive repository of old files. When used with the right set of technologies, cloud-integrated storage can deliver a whole new range of enterprise benefits, including global file sharing, rapid disaster recovery and simple, centralized IT management over a global storage infrastructure.

Advantages of Cloud Integrated Storage (CIS).

1. Reduces Infrastructure Requirements: Within any organization, dedicated labs are required to build traditional NAS/SAN solutions. In CIS, There is no need to have a physical storage infrastructure. Data can be archived and frequently accessed from cloud. This significantly reduces electricity requirements and man-power requirement within the organization, saving a big buck on energy consumption.
2. Reduction in Investment: CIS helps in reducing investments on hardware management. No need for up-gradation of new hardware. There is no need to buy expensive storage and you can scale data at many folds in CIS.
3. Unlimited snapshots: CIS can retain an unlimited number of snapshots without any impact to storage performance or utilization. This means that snapshots can finally eliminate the need for backup and, because access to the data can be re-established from different locations, including the cloud itself, CIS enables a simpler, more robust disaster recovery plan.
4. The logical location: Data’s logical location never changes even when data needs to be accessed from new locations, or during hardware refreshes of the end points. This is the fundamental difference between CIS and traditional storage.
5. Scalability: CIS provides end-user facility to scale up their storage to any extent as well as scale down as per requirement.
6. Pay-Per-Use: End user end up paying for only that much storage which they have used. So there is no need to buy additional storage and companies save lot of money.

Challenges in Cloud Integrated Storage

1. Security: There are 2 major security concerns which enterprises should look into while using CIS.
   1. Data Integrity: Companies need to be doubly sure of the data ownership before migrating to CIS. They need to make sure that the data stored on cloud get corrupted, removed or hacked.
   2. Data Access Control: Enterprises should address the data access control issue, they need to make sure that the data should not be accessible to any user who is not permitted to access it.
2. Latency: It is the time that passes between a request for the data and its delivery. There can be many factors affecting latency.
   1. Number of routers or ground to satellite communication on the way to target server.
   2. When many users share a single storage then the request may build up in queue
   3. Any drive failure
3. WAN Overhead: If customer’s WAN is busy, it increases the number of networks over which the data travels. Instead of just a local area network (LAN) or storage area network (SAN), data stored on a cloud requires a WAN (wide area network) to connect them both. That’s why some organizations invest in a dedicated WAN, which is an additional cost to the organization.
4. Performance: As the latency increases there is decrease of performance. It negatively effects read and write operations. With the increase in latency, throughput decreases.

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