The fact is that the answer to each can also part answer the other question.
When we consider what cloud is good at – scale, cost and capacity – it is possible to see how it can enhance areas where traditional enterprise solutions can be weak.
Another challenge for organisations adopting cloud storage is selecting the right cloud service for the business.
The choice of services from the main providers – Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform – is vast, but in this article we will look at what to consider when choosing a cloud storage provider.
Where to start
First, it’s important to know two things, namely what cloud storage can provide for your organisation and what your storage requirements are.
The first is easy. Anything that can be done in your own datacentre can also be done with cloud storage. The main cloud providers offer a wide range of storage types that cover the capacity, performance and resilience demands of most organisations.
This makes the second question even more fundamental. You must fully understand your organisation’s storage needs, be that a quick scalable storage layer for your application, a long-term backup archive, disaster recovery provision, or file sharing over geographically dispersed regions.
All of these can be done with cloud, but all require careful thought and robust definition before settling on a particular cloud storage provider. It is vital to do the research and take the time to understand what can be done and how to do it.
What not to worry about
While all parts of a cloud storage solution should be understood, some things in all the suppliers’ offerings are so similar that they shouldn’t be a major part of the decision process.
Cost
This may sound counter-intuitive, because the biggest challenges with cloud storage often concern cost. Understanding cost is essential, but when it comes to cloud storage, costs do not deviate much between providers.
Support
Each of the major providers offers a range of support services from basic to premium, and free to chargeable support levels, for cloud subscriptions.
Ingress/egress performance
It’s not choice of provider but physics that limits performance when moving data into and out of the cloud. All the major providers offer bandwidth that should be sufficient for any business.
Having said that, this can be a consideration when it comes to the location of the chosen storage provider. If your business needs to move data to and from the storage platform, then the further from the cloud provider you are located, the bigger the impact of latency. – Read more
Cloud storage offerings are often largely similar. We run through the key areas where they can differ, such as location, range of services and data protection