We are down at SNW in Orlando this week, and we plan to fill you in once we get back, but in the meantime, we thought we’d siphon through a few cloud-storage-related stories from the past week or so.
The hype surrounding cloud storage and the associated boom in cloud-related offerings has created some confusion around what the term actually means. You will find a good definition halfway down this Infostor page and this Mezeo piece attempts to re-work the standard somewhat, framing it with the IT service provider in mind.
The exact definition aside, it would be truly difficult to argue against the point that the cloud represents a fundamental shift in the way we approach storage today. Storage is no longer confined to your local data center. The cloud makes it global, accessible, redundant, and affordable.
Nasuni capitalizes on these features and transforms the cloud into an enterprise storage solution for companies. The Filer extends the local file system into the unlimited cloud, and delivers strong security, local-like performance, and snapshot-protection technology.
The fact is that many cloud offerings are not enterprise-ready. In this Computer World article, two researchers from ExtremeLabs in Indianapolis talk about how they tested several enterprise cloud storage providers, and saw mixed results.
The Filer avoids some of the pitfalls described in the review. It insulates IT execs and CIOs from a number of headaches. We take care of the APIs, for example, and we allay security concerns through OpenPGP encryption. Customer data remains customer data even when it heads to the cloud—no outside parties can read or decipher it.
Now, the key is that this is all done in a cost-effective way. Art Wittman at Information Week recently introduced what he calls the Storage Stockholm Syndrome, or the tendency of storage options to become increasingly expensive as you scale up. Companies justify the costs with added features and functionality, but Wittman suggests that it might be time to start looking for innovative and less expensive options. Following up on that piece, Mark Campbell at Modern Backup 2 says that backup should play a major role in a managed risk strategy.
At Nasuni, we see ourselves fitting perfectly here. The Filer offers cost-effective backup to the cloud. Thanks to our pay-as-you-go model, customers don’t hand over a premium for features they do not want or need. They only pay for what they use. All of these key requirements - cost-effectiveness, backup, strong security – are built into the Filer.
Finally, we leave you with this quote from an ITBusinessEdge piece: “Cloud-based storage may not be a convenient option for most enterprises in the very near future. It may be a necessity.”
We hope this proves true.