Betting on Cloud Storage

Cloud storage is emerging as the most favoured option for IT managers for backup, recovery and archival needs

In the current economic scenario, downsizing and cost containment have become a norm for any organisation. One of the biggest concerns for IT heads today is finding better methods and techniques to protect their information assets and be prepared for quick recovery. To address the cost-related challenges associated with data backup, recovery and archival, cloud storage is emerging as the most favoured option for providing enterprises an easy and reliable medium of backup strategy. Certain best practices could be followed to improve the backup, recovery and archival process.

Testing the Waters
While most companies prefer to go for a private cloud, there are concerns about upfront investments. To address this some vendors are already offering services termed on-demand private cloud and virtual storage on cloud. Other data centre players are likely to offer similar facilities shortly. While most IT heads at this point of time have gone in for traditional disk-based backup depending on the criticality of data, many large enterprises are testing the waters with cloud.

Vijayant Rai Director, India & SAARC, Nimsoft & Data Management, CA Technologies, says, We are seeing a lot of interest, especially in the SMB sector in various services like backup-as-a-service to the cloud and DR-as-as-a-service to the cloud.

According to Rai, many small businesses barely have the time, money and resources to run all IT operations and at the same time, adequately protect the systems, applications and data that their business depends on every day. And most dont have a disaster recovery plan and solution even though many would go out of business if hit with an unplanned disaster like fire, flood, hurricane or earthquake. Even simple day-to-day challenges like power outages, viruses, malware, and unplanned system outages can cause irreparable harm to their business. DR in cloud offerings is definitely an option being explored by SMBs, adds Rai.

V Srinivas, CIO of Nagarjuna Fertilisers and Chemicals Ltd, says, Data is growing exponentially and is very crucial for any organisation. Hence, backup and recovery are essential. In our company, we utilise about 60 GB of data every month and have hosted the primary data on our Tier IV data centre located at Hyderabad with full backup on the secondary data centre. Even our emails are on Lotus Notes. As such, we are not on the cloud yet. But looking at the future needs we are migrating to the cloud with email to start with.

Sandeep Singh Walia, Assistant General Manager (IT), HT Media, says, As a media company we have deployed about over 100 TB of data so far. About 45 TB of data is stored as secondary data related to ERP and SAP applications.

Walia added, We took a conscious decision to move our email services from Lotus to Microsoft 365, which is a cloud-based model. However, we dont have any plans to move our entire data to the cloud model as yet.

However, Lakshman Narayanaswamy, Co-founder & VP, Sanovi Technologies, has a different view. I see this very promising with players like Amazon, Google, Microsoftall in the race of virtual cloud movement. According to Narayanaswamy, there are two kinds of services being offeredpure storage and storage with application on the cloud, whose benefits are plenty.

Vendors like IBM find customers using cloud resilience services for better gains and speed. The new IBM SmartCloud Resilience services enable customers to protect their data and applications faster, cheaper and in a more flexible manner than they could earlier within a traditional data centre environment, says Erik Elzerman, Director, Tivoli Software Group, IBM Asia-Pacific.

However, there are several challenges that the IT heads need to put up with when it comes to cloud storage.

Cloud Storage Challenges
Industry experts say that industry is undergoing significant changes triggered by the emergence of cloud computing and the explosion of data, posing several challenges to IT heads. Shrinking backup and restoring windows and also leveraging new technologies like CDP, de-duplication are major challenges, says Kumar Mitra, Regional Director, India & SAARC, Data Protection, Quest Software. Besides, Mitra observes that aligning new technologies to organisations existing framework of e-discovery, policy enforcement, records compliance, and storage reduction is another challenge.

IT departments are struggling to adjust, as they grapple with leaner staff and trimmed budgets, given that the market does not have any Salesforce.com-like serious players who are on cloud storage, says Walia. Archie Jackson, GM-IT, Steria India Ltd, says that budget constraint is a major challenge as IT heads do not allocate adequate sum for this. Besides planning, cost, negotiations, SLA agreements also add to the challenges. One of the challenges encountered commonly is finding a right third party data centre. All the players claim to possess certifications on security, but there is not enough proof of the same when it comes to delivering the task on cloud, adds Srinivas.

According to CAs Rai, the single biggest challenge for IT managers today and in the near future will be visibility and control of his data and applications that now reside in multiple locations: on-premise, off-premise, with MSP/ private clouds and in third party cloud storage. In addition, it is managing the continuous and explosive growth of data, besides ensuring that applications are always available to the business.

How is Data Stored in the Cloud?
Finding enough storage space to hold all the data acquired is going to be a challenge. While certain amount of investment has already gone into traditional hard drives, some also prefer external storage devices like thumb drives or compact discs. But IT heads are now beginning to test the cloud storage models for storing their data.

The trend that Rai observes is cloud computing becoming integral to data protection. With investments going up, the data protection spending is focussing on management of hybrid cloud environment, investment in public cloud for backup and protection of private cloud.

Cloud storage refers to saving data on an offsite storage system maintained by a third party. Instead of storing information on your data centre or other local storage device, you save it in a remote database and connect to it through the internet.

Walia points the advantages of cloud storage over traditional data storageit enables the user to access data from any location without being concerned about the storage location.

Cloud Capacity and Cost
Most agree that for an organisation to buy about one TB of online space, say, from Google, it will cost about $250 a year. This is the annual fee, which means the recurring costs will be more. However, some online services offer certain amount of free storage. All cloud storage will have a pricing and metering engine.

Therefore, it points towards the need for the integration of quicker, more efficient and affordable backup and recovery solutions.

Amazon S3 Cloud Drive, one of the pioneers, offer S3, a low-cost data storage service equipped with own web management interface and APIs. In India, players like Tulip Cloud provide managed on-demand storage services and backup-as-a-service (BaaS) among others. CtrlS offers on demand IaaS services with inbuilt multi-tenancy and security and dedicated virtual appliances, and is said to be cost-effective.

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