Understanding Cloud Storage
During the first few years of the multi-year industry shift to the cloud, cloud-based servers garnered much of the attention. Only recently has the adoption of cloud storage accelerated. There are at least two important reasons for this lag.
First, some cloud storage providers have struggled to find the mix of services, features and price that appeal to enterprise IT organizations. In fact, most have still not succeeded here. While there are some interesting file sharing services emerging, enterprise CIOs demand unlimited file sizes, massive scale, global storage locations and instant access, self-healing, data consistency, military-level security and more.
Second, confusion caused by “cloudwashing”—where vendors label existing products and services as “cloud” when they lack essential attributes of cloud computing—has further slowed adoption. When cloud storage offerings require up-front payment, charge a fixed fee regardless of usage, require purchase in large increments, lack pooling of storage resources or fail to provide a useable cloud API, potential users should see red flags. Some vendors have even positioned storage hardware alone as “cloud storage” or even worse as “cloud in a box.”
