Will Everyone Move Their Storage Into the Cloud?

After the success of cloud storage services in the consumer space, why aren’t enterprises adopting on the same scale? What can be done by technology vendors and service providers to accelerate their adoption?

Firstly we need to understand why enterprises would even contemplate cloud storge. Quite simply, operating on-site storage is expensive. Not only do you have the capital expense of purchasing the storage array(s) in the first place, you typically also have a raft of recurring operating expenses including maintenance renewal fees, software licensing fees and data center costs.

Remember to double, perhaps triple, it all for a resilient multi-site solution! In addition, you have the pain of right-sizing the storage infrastructure; over provision and incur unnecessary capital and operational expenditure, under provision and you are likely to face capacity, performance and budgetary issues.

On paper, cloud storage is a very attractive proposition because ultimately there is no infrastructure to manage and used in the right way, with the right data and traffic profiles, it can be relatively inexpensive. As with the majority of cloud services you only pay for what you use and you get as much capacity as you need – on demand. As part of the default pricing structure, most cloud storage services also create geographically redundant copies of your data automatically. UTOPIA right? Well, the reality is that while there is indeed huge potential for cost reduction using cloud storage, it hasn't been heavily adopted  by enterprises for a number of reasons:

• - Security and Compliance: Data security is critical for all but a few large enterprises. Although cloud storage providers are focusing a significant percentage of their time and budgets to secure customer information and provide location specific options, there is still a perceived risk that data can be compromised. For regulated industries or companies working with sensitive information, or even for those who are simply risk averse, this makes cloud storage a non-starter.
• - Performance: Unless you move your applications close to the cloud storage, which can be hard to guarantee even using the same service provider, data is accessed over the Internet, with far less bandwidth and much higher latency than a traditional storage network. On top of this, storage specific protocols are replaced by internet protocols such as HTTP and TCP/IP so applications simply don’t work well across the Internet when they have been written with the expectation of local storage performance. Even if you can get the required network bandwidth, latency and protocols, cloud storage providers typically don’t offer performance SLAs at the I/O level.
• - Data Protection and Availability: As mentioned previously, cloud storage providers automatically keep multiple copies of data in geographically separate locations. Whilst this is great for a full site or physical equipment failure, it doesn’t protect against user or application errors such as accidental deletions or data corruption. All user actions or corruption is repeated across all the physical copies of the data. With on-site storage, enterprise arrays typically have snapshots to guard against such issues.