What are the most common
cloud storage use cases?

It is an undoubted fact that the amount of data to be stored by every company or person is growing at an unprecedented pace and we all need to keep track of that growth either by investing in new equipment to store this data at our premises, at service provider premises or in the cloud.

Cloud storage is one of the possible alternatives for companies to massively scale in available storage capacity, but this can be also very costly in the longer run. Most incumbent cloud storage providers make use of their services attractive, but later customers end up with enormous bills as there are usually hidden fees associated with what have been overlooked in the beginning. For example storing data might be in reality cheap, but accessing it can be costly. Some companies also charge both for inbound and outbound traffic to your data.

We at Storadera believe that simplicity and cost predictability is key to solve this problem, which is why lots of companies are afraid of cloud storage services. Our mission is to provide scalable service and at the same time provide very simple and predictable pricing.

Cloud storage will not replace enterprise storage infrastructure in any time soon. There will always be use cases where speed of access and latency requirements require fast on premise storage, but as data amounts are growing then there will be more use cases for secondary storage.

Small Business scenario

More and more small businesses don’t have their own IT infrastructure and they are purely cloud based. It is quite common understanding that if a company already has cloud services like Microsoft Office 365, OneDrive, Salesforce etc then there is no need for backup. Actually this is not true. Although likelihood that service providers will lose your data, this possibility exists. Most of service providers’ contracts fineprint states clearly that backup is customer responsibility. So why take a risk to lose your precious data that might even add value over time.

With Storadera you can manage your risks better and have predictable and easy to calculate backup costs.

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Backup

Backing up data to the cloud achieves immediately one of the main objectives of backup to separate it from production data. This is even more important now as a result of active cyber threats such as ransomware.

Cloud backup can be a simple manual process to copy files to mainly consumer oriented services like Google Drive or Dropbox. At the other end are enterprises who need tiered backups with complex software solutions pulling data from a myriad of applications in use and pushing it into the cloud.

There are many different backup solutions available that manage translation from block and file to the cloud’s object based formats, and back. This complexity is usually handled by modern backup applications like Veeam or Synology with integrated tools

An emerging need is cloud to cloud backup which targets organisations’ need for greater data security and redundancy for cloud-based applications.

With Storadera you can manage your risks better and have predictable and easy to calculate backup costs.

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Archive

Data archiving and long term retention in the cloud is becoming increasingly lucrative use cases for businesses’ as cloud storage costs are falling. There are many service providers who offer near-line and cold storage at very affordable rates. Cloud storage can be even cheaper than tape.

Cloud based archiving can offer similar redundancy advantages to cloud based backup. In the case of tape, cloud even removes the need for securely sending tapes off-site which is certainly a strong argument for cloud archive.

Organisations can think of cloud storage as an infinite resource and in case cost is affordable then there is no reason (only regulatory) not to keep data for longer periods of time.

Also in the dawn of different AI technologies that promise to make better and informed business decisions, it makes sense for companies to keep more of historical data that might not provide value in today’s business decisions, but might do so in the near future when affordable AI and Machine Learning technologies will become available.

With Storadera your costs for your archive space are always predictable and easy to calculate.

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Disaster Recovery

Disaster recovery can take cloud based backup a step further. With proper planning in place and resources available, company could replicate almost its whole infrastructure to the cloud. 

Many companies already using extensively core applications like email, ERP, CRM etc on a SaaS basis. Like SaaS, moving to cloud storage can make organisation’s disaster recovery and business continuity a lot more easier.

Disaster Recovery key metrics like RPO (recovery point objective) and RTO (recovery time objective) don’t disappear with cloud. The latter can be challenging to achieve because of possible bandwidth constraints. Also, depending of cloud storage service provider, there might also be latency constraints. Typical questions that might pop up, is there sufficient bandwidth to create data copy and then bring it back to the production system when needed? For many organisations still local backup and copy of it in the cloud is safe bet, but local backup can be costly and needs to be managed also. Anyway this needs thorough considerations and understanding of all costs associated with what recovering from the cloud means for an organisation. Of course this also applies that every plan is useless if it is not put to the test.

With Storadera your required disaster recovery solution storage space is always predictable and easy to calculate.

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