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Storage. It's among the biggest challenges facing firms that feel the need (legally and operationally) to save everything. It is the foundation for company operations and the place where data starts and finishes its many independent and co-dependent lives. Instead of buying room after room full of networked storage devices, or in addition to doing so on the proper scale, companies are now taking advantage of secure private cloud solutions. There are, of course, problems to be worked out and challenges to be overcome. In one classic scenario, a company would need to spin up a thousand servers in a day to deal with unplanned demand, or 20 servers to close the books at the end of a quarter. After a few days, the firm can spin them down again. In this situation, cloud computing really does save the day. It is far more difficult, expensive and problematic to scale owned or leased storage capacity up and down on demand, which could be used for data mining, scratch storage needs or intensive virtual simulations of various kinds. The virtual is the savior of the physical in the new age of cloud computing. Relentless growth Because organizations feel pressure to save every single file, e-mail and document (sometimes for the IRS, sometimes for the SEC, sometimes just to be safe), the growth of storage needs has been relentless in recent years. While the cost of standalone hard drives and RAID arrays has fallen, there is still the matter of maintenance, operational oversight and replacement costs. As time goes by, the challenges and problems are being dealt with, and the cloud computing model is no longer the controversial idea it once was. There are, of course, major concerns that the experience of early adopters like Google and Amazon.com brought to light. The two primary concerns concerning cloud usage are security and lock-in. The fact is that shared infrastructure is a fearful concept to many corporate executives. They need to know their data is safe from prying eyes, and that is really is located in a specific, identifiable, defensible place. Hundreds of articles and white papers address this issue, indicating that the concern is real and widespread. The security and privacy issues are not all resolved to everyone's satisfaction, but the best of the cloud solution companies are working tireless on this. Lock-in issues Cloud lock-in is another dicey issue. Every public cloud firm creates its own unique user interface, or API (Application Programming Interface), requiring customers to set themselves up to those specifications. Changing providers means reprogramming to another spec, and moving everything means being double-charged for the in-out bandwidth. This makes changing vendors very difficult as well as costly, creating a lock-in problem. Of course, it is primarily the customers who conceive of it as a problem. To some firms, it is job security. However, where there's a problem, there are enlightened firms offering various new solutions. One way of addressing the lock-in issue is by empowering customer with a private cloud and allowing them to write their files with such standard protocols as NFS, FTP and HTTP. Not only are these widely and well understood, with the bugs having been worked out over years, but they have been deployed broadly. Other, newer protocols such as WebDAV are coming online to offer the customers even greater flexibility and choice. Private and secure Deploying a private cloud within a customer firewall allows its employees to manage it in their own manner, and security policies can be implemented as desired to secure both data and access to it. The company will continue to benefit from the economies of scale and efficiencies of the cloud storage model. Even before broadly based standards are adopted by the industry, service providers and organizations can leverage current technologies to move in, around, from and to public, private and hosted clouds. The major new security issue regards control of data. Security is a huge, multifaceted topic, of course, but among public clouds data control is the big question mark. For example, if your data is co-located with a firm that is the target of a government subpoena, it may be swept up by the same, broad broom even though your company is not the target of the action. Events of this kind in the cell phone industry should give pause to everyone and initiate some creative thinking about the most robust kind of security possible. Essentially, the cloud computing decision revolves around capacity, quality, flexibility and more importantly security. Public clouds are one kind of model for dealing with storage demands, while private ones offer such options such as thin or fixed provisioning, even a combination of the two. Company owners confused at the current state of the art should consult cloud computing professionals qualified on all the various questions and, more importantly, able to offer working answers. It's a changing landscape, made of clouds, and having a guide to lead you through them is a good idea.
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