Background

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Advantages and Limitations of Cloud Storage

The cloud has been generating a substantial amount of IT buzz in recent years. To some extent, the excitement is justified, as it offers unlimited capacity at an affordable price. Files consume the largest share of storage in most organizations and many of them are created, modified, and then never opened again. An employee might generate a spreadsheet, work on it for a few days, ask colleagues to make changes, present the finished work, and then store it away. They do not want to delete the file, but they may never open it again, either. Some small businesses are generating gigabytes of data like this every day. Put simply, it does not make sense to store all of this data on local, expensive, fast disks, and continually buy new hard-drives to guarantee that there is always enough space. Not with the cloud out there.

The number of cloud storage providers is steadily growing. These providers range from “public” services available to anyone with a credit card to “private” providers that require a certification process and offer added security and archiving features.

Despite the excitement and potential benefits, however, there are still limitations. The cloud, after all, is essentially another term for the Internet—data is transferred to and from remote server farms over the wire. And, as a result, it has some of that medium’s weaknesses. For example, if a file system were to link directly to the cloud, so that a client’s read/write requests were forwarded to a cloud provider instead of local NAS units, there would be noticeable delays. Compared with a local operation, it takes a long time to pull data from the cloud and serve it back to a client.

As for cloud security, the strategies and techniques vary, but there are often gaps that could allow a malicious agent to either read or delete data. In some cases, for example, data is sent unencrypted across a secure channel, then encrypted at the provider’s premises before being sent to the cloud. This prevents malicious agents from spying on data en route, but it does not protect the customer’s files from that provider’s employees.