Enterprise organisations confront a significant hurdle with the exponential growth of big data and the extensive storage management tasks needed to maintain it.
At CSG, we collaborate with you and your business, leveraging industry-standard hardware and Microsoft technologies, to identify and address any obstacles you encounter in managing your data effectively.
Why does cloud storage have an advantage over local data centres?
What advantages does cloud storage offer? Nowadays, nearly everyone engages with some form of cloud storage. If you’re using a photo service with cloud access or employing document storage tools like OneDrive, you’re utilising cloud storage. Essentially, any tool facilitating data access or file synchronisation across multiple devices, such as phones, tablets, and PCs, relies on cloud storage. Given its widespread adoption, can enterprises also leverage the benefits of cloud storage?
In most instances, the answer is affirmative. Cloud storage presents numerous distinct advantages, making it a prudent and more efficient data storage solution for enterprises. These advantages include:
Accessibility and redundancy
The ongoing process of web enablement and digitalisation within our work environments continues to grant us greater flexibility, eliminating constraints such as location, time, and device type regarding data accessibility. Local data storage, whether on an individual computer’s hard drive or within a network storage system like a storage area network, is inherently limited in its accessibility capabilities.
To match the accessibility offered by cloud storage, local storage must be integrated into networks featuring high-capacity network devices to ensure consistent file transfer efficiency regardless of location. This infrastructure must remain operational and maintainable without interruptions, all while adhering to stringent data security requirements. As cloud storage enhances data accessibility in our personal lives, there is a growing expectation for similar accessibility within our workplaces. While providing such accessibility can be costly, economies of scale make it increasingly cost-effective. Cloud storage possesses a scalability advantage, as cloud providers serve multiple customers rather than a single organisation.
For seamless anytime availability, storage solutions require robust redundancy measures to mitigate equipment failure, manage disaster recovery scenarios, and accommodate spikes in storage usage. Implementing and maintaining a high level of redundancy is a multifaceted endeavour, extending beyond physical storage media to encompass servers, networks, power supplies, and even entire data centres. Enterprises must prioritise efficient data backup and recovery procedures to mitigate the risk of data corruption and promptly identify events that could jeopardise data integrity.
Cloud storage providers inherently embed redundancy into their services, given that their entire business model relies on continuous availability. Additionally, cloud storage services offer varying service levels based on availability (and thus redundancy), providing businesses with tailored solutions to meet their specific needs.
Data security
Data security is a key concern for cloud storage providers and a part of their business model—they need to deliver security, or they will lose their customers. After all, you’re not going to entrust your data to someone who can’t or won’t guarantee data protection.
But is cloud storage safer than local storage? While it’s possible to create a similar defence setup for local storage, the constant configuration changes, maintenance, and upgrades needed require specialist skills to ensure the setup is properly configured and has the ability to perform proactive actions to avoid or prevent security breaches. All of this costs money, and when competing with other budgetary demands in an organization where data storage isn’t the main selling point, it’s going to be hard to secure the funding.
For cloud storage providers, having the skills and resources necessary to ensure data security is vital to the success of the core business. As a result, cloud storage is constantly monitored, maintained, and improved. Local storage may seem more secure than cloud storage because it remains isolated. However, when local storage is attacked, the risk of a security issue is higher.
Ability to collaborate on documents and files
Collaborating on stored content requires a single main copy of the content that is accessible to all collaborators. This means that the content should be available to everyone who needs it, regardless of where they are located. As business becomes more distributed in today’s world, it is essential to support distributed work and effective collaboration with partners, suppliers, and customers.
Cloud storage is the best tool for collaboration because it gives equal access to files to everyone who has the right to use them. This makes it a perfect solution for any group that needs to collaborate but works in different locations or time zones. Cloud storage also allows you to collaborate beyond your own team or organisation by letting you manage access to files in storage without having to give users access to your private network and risk exposing systems to users who don’t need them.
Scalability
The success and growth of a cloud storage provider depend on how well it can scale its storage capacity to have enough space for its customers. This requires investing in the latest technologies to make sure that the space is available and usable. However, a business that does not specialise in storage will have to acquire storage capacity based on their current needs and short-term projections. It’s not likely that such a business would get the approval to spend more money on advanced technology to prepare for future growth possibilities.
Cloud storage providers (like us!) have contracts with storage vendors we can even create storage solutions to ensure that the equipment has short delivery times. Smaller, less frequent equipment orders for smaller local storage requirements have relatively longer delivery times, which means the ability to increase local storage is limited by an organisation’s ability to foresee growth and plan for it – that’s where CSG steps in to manage everything for you.
Cost and resource savings
Cloud storage providers can work at scale and pass on the cost savings to their customers over time. Local storage in a data centre requires paying for upkeep, supervision, and problem-solving, as well as any necessary hardware purchases – and paying the wages of qualified staff with different skills. This creates a fixed monthly cost regardless of how much storage space is used.
Buying hardware and replacement parts creates capital expenditure, which needs to account for not only current capacity needs but also future capacity needs. By using a cloud provider, that overhead is included in a stable monthly fee, creating a regular budget at expected service-level agreements for IT performance. This means that the amount of storage provided matches directly to current needs, not what might be needed in six months or a year.
If your organisation’s growth is slower than expected, then the amount of data stored will grow slowly, and, with a cloud storage provider, the cost will also grow slowly based on usage. For local storage, a lot more of the cost is needed up front, and if growth is slower than forecast, the value of the investment will not be achieved, and the cost of the data storage being used effectively becomes higher. So by partnering with CSG to manage your cloud storage, you will effectively reduce outgoing costs.
Compliance with legislation and regulations for storing data
Technology empowers us, but it also poses the danger of being used wrongly or harmfully (intentionally or not). Laws have changed to regulate data storage and privacy with broad scope. The bigger the organisation, the more laws they have to follow – and the rules get harder for global businesses.
CSG meets these standards, helps customers comply with them effectively, and has proven our compliance through frequent audits to stay ahead.
Archives and backup data
Archives and backups are vital for any enterprise. And there are different ways to store them – from keeping them in the data centre on regular storage devices to copying and storing removable media in a different location. Each method has its advantages and disadvantages, but since a backup or an archive often needs to be accessed, access speed is always an important factor.
Besides the level of redundancy cloud providers offer, they also meet disaster recovery needs by storing data in multiple distant data centres. Along with risk reduction, using a cloud storage provider for archives and backup data can help lower costs further while minimizing any effect on accessibility, allowing for a smooth failover restoration whenever needed.
Why use Enterprise cloud storage?
CSG’s Enterprise Cloud Storage solutions will enhance your organisation’s productivity. You can optimise your IT budget and provide your staff with adaptable storage options. And you can also maintain your data’s availability and security.
One of the main difficulties for enterprise organisations is managing the increasing amount of big data. It also requires a lot of storage management work to cope with it. CSG will use industry-standard hardware and collaborate with your business to identify the challenges you have. We will suggest a solution that meets your growing needs and helps provide a dependable and high-speed storage infrastructure.
We can help you to:
- Provide the high performance your private cloud deployments require
- Maintain service through hardware failure, without disruption to storage availability
- Scale your storage requirements easily as demands increase
- Reduce costs, while maintaining the performance and availability of traditional storage methods
- Provision a flexible hybrid storage solution for your primary storage, archive and disaster recovery needs
Enterprise storage uses a storage area network (SAN). It has advantages such as high availability and disaster recovery, data sharing and effective, dependable backup and restoration features. Server failure never causes a loss of access to crucial information and applications.
Data is growing fast and making it hard for IT departments to manage. CSG can use Microsoft’s standard technologies to create a powerful Enterprise Cloud Storage network that can scale up with your needs.