What is cloud storage?
Consider a secure, off-site warehouse where all your business's digital assets reside, accessible to authorised personnel 24/7 from anywhere with an internet connection. This is the power of cloud storage services, a virtual vault that eliminates the need for bulky on-site servers and hardware, freeing up valuable office space and resources.
For businesses, cloud storage offers a wealth of benefits beyond just convenience. It enables seamless collaboration among teams, regardless of their geographic location.
Employees can easily share, edit, and co-author documents in real-time, fostering productivity and streamlining workflows. Additionally, cloud storage provides a robust backup solution, protecting critical data from hardware failures, natural disasters, and cyber threats.
The scalability of cloud storage is another key advantage for businesses. As your company grows, your storage needs will inevitably increase. Cloud storage allows you to easily scale your capacity up or down with a few clicks, ensuring you only pay for what you use. This eliminates the need for costly hardware upgrades and allows you to focus your resources on core business operations.
Why is cloud storage important?
Cloud storage has become an indispensable tool for modern businesses, offering a multitude of advantages that contribute to their growth and success. Three key reasons why cloud storage is crucial are its cost-effectiveness, increased agility, and faster deployment.
Cost-effectiveness
Traditional on-premises file storage solutions often involve significant upfront investments in hardware, software licences, and ongoing maintenance costs for users.
Cloud storage, on the other hand, operates on a pay-as-you-go or subscription model, allowing businesses to avoid the need for large capital expenditures and only pay for the file storage they actually use. This flexibility can lead to substantial cost savings, particularly for small and medium-sized enterprises with fluctuating storage needs.
Increased agility
Cloud storage services empower businesses to adapt quickly to changing market conditions and customer demands. With the ability to scale storage capacity up or down effortlessly, organisations can respond to needs, spikes in demand, or seasonal fluctuations without having to invest in additional hardware or worry about overprovisioning. This agility enables businesses to remain competitive and seize opportunities as they arise.
Faster deployment
Setting up and maintaining on-premises storage infrastructure can be a time-consuming and complex process.
Cloud storage services, in contrast, can be deployed rapidly, often within minutes or hours, allowing businesses to get up and running quickly without significant IT overhead. This faster deployment translates to faster time-to-market for new products or services, giving businesses a competitive edge.
Efficient data management
Cloud storage providers offer a wide range of tools and features that simplify data management. From automated backups and version control to data analytics and search capabilities, cloud storage services enable businesses to organise, protect, and extract valuable insights from their data more efficiently.
Virtually unlimited scalability
One of the most significant advantages of cloud storage is its virtually limitless scalability for storing files. As your business grows, so does your data need. Cloud storage allows you to effortlessly scale your storage capacity up or down to meet your changing needs. This ensures that you always have the right amount of storage available without overspending on unused capacity.
Business continuity
Cloud storage services play a critical role in disaster recovery and business continuity planning. By replicating data across multiple geographic locations, cloud providers ensure that your data remains safe and accessible even in the event of hardware failures, natural disasters, or cyberattacks. This redundancy minimises downtime and allows your business to continue operating even in challenging circumstances.
How does cloud storage work?
Cloud storage is a modern way to store your users’ files, not on your own physical devices, but on remote servers accessed through the internet. It's like having a virtual hard drive in the sky where you can keep your files, photos, videos, and other data safe and sound.
At its core, cloud storage works by distributing your data across a network of interconnected servers. These servers, often located in massive data centres, are designed to store vast amounts of information reliably and securely.
When you upload a file to the cloud, it's broken down into smaller chunks and spread across these servers. This not only ensures redundancy, protecting your data in case of server failure but also allows for quick access from any location with an internet connection.
To make cloud storage services user-friendly, providers offer software applications or web interfaces. These interfaces typically resemble file explorers, allowing you to navigate through your cloud-stored data, create folders, and perform common actions like uploading, downloading, sharing, and deleting files.
Good cloud storage services even integrate with other productivity tools, making it seamless to work with your documents or media across different platforms.
Scalability as a core advantage
One significant advantage of cloud storage is its scalability. Unlike physical hard drives, which have limited capacity, cloud storage can expand almost infinitely to accommodate your growing needs.
This flexibility makes it a popular choice for both individuals and businesses, as they can easily upgrade their storage plans as their data requirements increase. Additionally, cloud storage providers often offer competitive pricing models, making it a cost-effective solution compared to investing in and maintaining on-premises storage infrastructure.
Security benefits too
Security is a paramount concern in cloud file storage, and providers invest heavily in safeguarding your data. They employ various measures, such as encryption, access controls, and regular security audits, to protect against unauthorised access, data breaches, and other threats.
Furthermore, cloud storage services eliminate the risk of losing data due to device damage or theft, as your information is stored remotely and can be recovered easily through your account.
What are the types of cloud storage?
Cloud storage comes in various types, each designed to meet specific needs. Choosing the right type of cloud storage depends on factors like the type of data you need to store, the required performance, scalability, and cost considerations. Understanding the different types and their characteristics can help you make informed decisions to optimise your cloud storage strategy.
Object storage
What is object based storage? This type is ideal for storing vast amounts of unstructured data for users, like images, videos, or log files. In object storage, data is stored as objects, each with a unique identifier, metadata, and the actual data itself.
This simplifies management and retrieval, especially for large-scale applications. Object storage is highly scalable, durable, and cost-effective, making it a popular choice for storing backups, archives, and content delivery.
File storage
As the name suggests, file storage organises data in a hierarchical structure of folders and files. This familiar format resembles traditional file systems, making it easy for users and applications to navigate and access data.
File storage is commonly used for sharing files between users, collaborating on documents, and running applications that rely on file-based access. However, it may not be as scalable as object storage for massive datasets.
Block storage
This type is often used for storing structured data and files for users that require high performance and low latency, like databases or virtual machine disks. Block storage divides data into fixed-size blocks and addresses them individually.
This allows for efficient random access and modifications, making it suitable for applications that need quick read-and-write operations. Block storage is typically more expensive than other types but offers superior performance for specific use cases.
Hybrid cloud storage
Hybrid cloud storage combines the benefits of both public and private cloud storage. It allows organisations to store sensitive or critical data in a private cloud for enhanced security and control while leveraging the scalability and cost-effectiveness of a public cloud for less sensitive data or applications that require burstable resources.
Hybrid cloud storage services offer flexibility and can be tailored to meet an organisation's specific needs, providing a balance between performance, security, and cost optimization.
What cloud storage requirements should you consider?
Durability and availability
Durability refers to the ability of the storage system to withstand component failures and prevent data loss. Ensure the provider offers robust data replication and redundancy mechanisms to safeguard your data against hardware malfunctions or natural disasters. Look for providers that guarantee high durability percentages, typically measured in "nines" (e.g., 99.
Availability refers to the accessibility of your data whenever you need it. Verify the provider's service level agreements (SLAs) for uptime guarantees, which indicate the percentage of time your data will be accessible. Consider your specific needs for data availability and choose a provider that meets or exceeds those requirements.
Security
Ensure your data is encrypted both in transit and at rest. Strong encryption algorithms, such as AES-256, should be employed to protect your data from unauthorised access.
Look for features like granular permissions, role-based access controls (RBAC), and multi-factor authentication (MFA) to tightly control who can access and modify your data.
If your industry has specific data protection regulations, ensure the provider complies with those standards (e.g., HIPAA, GDPR). Consider where your data is physically stored and if it aligns with your organisation's data residency requirements.
Other considerations
Choose a service that can scale seamlessly as your data storage needs grow or shrink. This flexibility ensures you only pay for the storage you use. Evaluate the provider's read and write speeds, especially if your applications require high-performance or low-latency access to data.
Compare pricing models from different providers, considering factors like storage capacity, data transfer fees, and additional features. If you use other cloud services or applications, ensure the storage service integrates well with those platforms to streamline workflows.
Research the provider's track record for reliability, security, and customer support to ensure you choose a reputable vendor.
Data management features: Look for features like versioning, lifecycle management, and data recovery options to effectively manage and protect your data.
Potential risks of cloud storage
Despite its many advantages, cloud storage services come with inherent risks that enterprises must address proactively. Data breaches and unauthorised access remain significant concerns, requiring robust security measures like encryption, access controls, and regular audits.
These breaches can occur due to weak security practices, misconfigurations, or sophisticated cyberattacks, potentially exposing sensitive data to malicious actors. Additionally, data loss due to unforeseen events like hardware failures, natural disasters, or even human error necessitates data redundancy and comprehensive backup strategies.
Enterprises must also consider the risk of vendor lock-in, where they become overly reliant on a specific cloud provider, making it difficult and costly to switch in the future. To mitigate this, organisation users should prioritise a cloud storage service with open standards and APIs, allowing for greater flexibility and data portability.
Furthermore, the potential for downtime and service disruptions poses a risk to business continuity. To minimise the impact of such events, it is crucial to choose providers with high availability guarantees and have robust contingency plans in place.
What are cloud storage use cases?
Analytics and data lakes
Cloud storage provides a scalable and cost-effective foundation for building user data lakes and central repositories where vast amounts of raw data from various sources are stored. This data can be structured, semi-structured, or unstructured and encompasses everything from customer interactions and social media feeds to sensor data and financial transactions.
Cloud storage's ability to handle diverse data types and massive volumes makes it ideal for data lakes. Organisations can then leverage powerful analytics tools and machine learning algorithms to process this data, uncovering valuable insights that drive business decisions, improve operational efficiency, and identify new opportunities.
Software test and development
Cloud storage enables the creation of agile and scalable development environments. Developers can spin up virtual machines, access code repositories, and store test data in the cloud, accelerating the software development lifecycle.
Cloud-based development environments can be easily replicated and shared among team members, fostering collaboration and ensuring consistency. Additionally, cloud storage allows for easy backup and recovery of development data, protecting against accidental deletions or code corruption.
Compliance
Many industries are subject to strict data protection and privacy regulations. Cloud storage providers offer robust security and compliance features to help organisations meet these requirements.
Encryption, access controls, audit trails, and data residency options are just a few of the tools available to ensure compliance with regulations like GDPR, HIPAA, and CCPA. Cloud storage providers often undergo independent audits and certifications to validate their compliance posture, giving organisations peace of mind regarding data security and regulatory adherence.
Archive
Cloud storage offers a cost-effective and scalable solution for archiving infrequently accessed data. Organisations can offload their historical data, compliance records, or other archival information to the cloud, freeing up valuable on-premises storage space and reducing storage costs.
Cloud storage providers typically offer different storage tiers with varying pricing based on data access frequency, allowing organisations to optimise storage costs based on their specific needs.
Database storage
Cloud storage can be used to store database backups, ensuring that critical data can be recovered in the event of a database failure. Additionally, cloud storage can be used to host entire databases, providing scalability, high availability, and disaster recovery capabilities.
Cloud-based databases can be easily scaled up or down based on demand, and their data is replicated across multiple availability zones for redundancy and fault tolerance.
Backup and disaster recovery
Cloud storage offers a secure and reliable offsite location for storing backups of critical data and applications. This ensures that organisations can quickly recover their data and restore operations in the event of hardware failures, natural disasters, or cyberattacks.
A cloud-based backup service often provides features like versioning, incremental backups, and point-in-time recovery, allowing for granular restoration of data to specific points in time. This minimises downtime and data loss, safeguarding businesses against unforeseen disruptions.
Cloud data migration
Migrating data to the cloud can be a complex process, but cloud storage simplifies it significantly. An organisation's user can leverage cloud storage as a staging area for transferring data from on-premises systems to the cloud.
This allows for phased migrations, minimising disruptions to ongoing operations. Cloud storage also offers tools and services to facilitate data transfer, validation, and transformation, ensuring a smooth and successful migration. Once in the cloud, data becomes more accessible, scalable, and cost-effective to manage.
Cloud-native application storage
Modern cloud-native applications are designed to leverage the cloud's inherent scalability and flexibility. Cloud storage is an integral component of these applications, serving as a persistent data layer for storing configuration files, application data, and user-generated content.
Cloud storage's ability to scale on demand and seamlessly integrate with other cloud services makes it the ideal storage solution for cloud-native applications.
Hybrid cloud storage
Hybrid cloud storage combines the benefits of on-premises storage and cloud storage. Organisations can keep sensitive data on-premises while leveraging the cloud for less critical or frequently accessed data.
This approach provides flexibility, cost optimisation, and data sovereignty. Hybrid cloud storage solutions often offer seamless integration between on-premises and cloud environments, enabling data to be moved between them as needed.
ML and IoT
Machine learning (ML) and the Internet of Things (IoT) generate massive amounts of data that require storage and processing. Cloud storage offers the scalability and flexibility needed to handle this data deluge.
ML models can be trained on vast datasets stored in the cloud, and IoT devices can stream data directly to the cloud for analysis and processing. Cloud storage also provides the infrastructure for storing and managing the results of ML models and IoT analytics, enabling data-driven insights and decision-making.
OVHcloud & cloud storage
A comprehensive range of solutions to store your data
There are sometimes constraints that will depend on the type of data you need to store and what it is used for, so an adapted solution is required. Whether you need an object storage solution, block storage, a long-term archiving space, or a backup solution for Public Cloud volumes and instances, OVHcloud offers cloud storage solutions to suit all your needs.