

This allows your organization to treat cloud storage costs as an ongoing operating expense instead of a capital expense with the associated upfront investments and tax implications. Cost-effective: As mentioned, you pay for the capacity you use.With cloud storage, you can provision the service and start using it within hours or days, depending on how much capacity is involved. Quick implementation: Using a cloud service accelerates the process of setting up and adding to your storage capabilities.As such, your staff can focus on other priorities. This frees your staff from tasks associated with storage, such as procurement, installation, administration, and maintenance. Off-site management: Your cloud provider assumes responsibility for maintaining and protecting the stored data.But it also raises some concerns for companies, primarily over security and administrative control. Some organizations use hybrid clouds to supplement their internal storage networks with public cloud storage.Īs with any other cloud-based technology, cloud storage offers some distinct advantages. For instance, highly regulated data subject to strict archiving and replication requirements is usually more suited to a private cloud environment, whereas less sensitive data (such as email that doesn’t contain business secrets) can be stored in the public cloud. Hybrid cloud storage : This model combines elements of private and public clouds, giving organizations a choice of which data to store in which cloud. Organizations that might prefer private cloud storage include banks or retail companies due to the private nature of the data they process and store.
BACKUP STORAGE MEANING FULL
You can choose to take full control of an on-premise private cloud or engage a cloud storage provider to build a dedicated private cloud that you can access with a private connection. Private cloud storage: Private cloud storage setups typically replicate the cloud model, but they reside within your network, leveraging a physical server to create instances of virtual servers to increase capacity. Providers typically make services accessible from just about any device, including smartphones and desktops and let you scale up and down as needed.

Public storage clouds: In this model, you connect over the internet to a storage cloud that’s maintained by a cloud provider and used by other companies. This way, if a server is taken down for maintenance or suffers an outage, you can still access your data.Ĭloud storage is available in private, public and hybrid clouds. The server with which you connect forwards your data to a pool of servers located in one or more data centers, depending on the size of the cloud provider’s operation.Īs part of the service, providers typically store the same data on multiple machines for redundancy. Typically, you connect to the storage cloud either through the internet or a dedicated private connection, using a web portal, website, or a mobile app.

As your storage needs increase, the provider creates new virtual servers to meet demand. Most of the servers you use are virtual machines hosted on a physical server. Like on-premise storage networks, cloud storage uses servers to save data however, the data is sent to servers at an off-site location. While your costs might increase over time to account for higher data volumes, you don’t have to overprovision storage networks in anticipation of increased data volume. You pay for only exactly the capacity you use. By storing data in a cloud, your organization save by paying for storage technology and capacity as a service, rather than investing in the capital costs of building and maintaining in-house storage networks. SANs are expensive to maintain, however, because as stored data grows, companies have to invest in adding servers and infrastructure to accommodate increased demand.Ĭloud storage services provide elasticity, which means you can scale capacity as your data volumes increase or dial down capacity if necessary.
BACKUP STORAGE MEANING ARCHIVE
Traditionally, organizations built and maintained storage area networks (SANs) to archive data and files. When users run out of storage, they need to transfer files to an external storage device. Computer hard drives can only store a finite amount of data. The provider hosts, secures, manages, and maintains the servers and associated infrastructure and ensures you have access to the data whenever you need it.Ĭloud storage delivers a cost-effective, scalable alternative to storing files on on-premise hard drives or storage networks. Data that you transfer off-site for storage becomes the responsibility of a third-party cloud provider. Cloud storage allows you to save data and files in an off-site location that you access either through the public internet or a dedicated private network connection.
