Forecast: Cloudy with a chance of perfect storage!

Internet based online storage; otherwise famous as cloud storage solutions, have given on-premise storage facilities a run for their money. The ‘cloud-o-phobia’ that enterprises face has taught solution- providers to strategize their sell. Many have offered the step –wise or stage-wise approach where the enterprise moves from archive to online storage and finally to the live storage. Even the most anti-cloud naysayer will agree that as a disaster recovery (DR) solution, the cloud is a winner.

While security and redundancy for your data are the main features that enterprises look for when shopping for cloud, the storage solutions compete for very much the costs, hassles and reliability (to have absolute protection) numbers. I would like to write a wish-list for the ideal cloud storage solution – one that would have the following silver linings:
• Scalable
• Back-up
• Recovery
• Archiving
• Synchronization
• Replication
• Unified and Integrated Platform
• Storage Resource Management
• Search capabilities
• Low-latency
• Multiple tenancy
• APIs to allow developers to plug-in a variety of applications and services and
• Obviously! Low-cost.
It would of course give a competitive advantage if the solution had usage-based pricing, elastic flexibility and multi-level security. While DropBox steals the show for overall cloud storage services with its ability to work on many flavors of technology and it’s easy to use, secure and reliable features, there are other giants that rule the skies of the enterprise world.
The Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) has been a market leader – an early and aggressive one at that! Amazon, with its low cost and multiple data center locations, allows you to run your websites, operate an e-commerce business and even use it as a DR storage for the entire business. On the other hand Microsoft Azure power packed with features for cloud computing and analysis, with its modern interface is as easy to use as it is to choose!
There are many storage solutions out there providing the robust and reliable solution, but it’s up to you to choose the perfect cloud based data storage provider – based on your organizational needs. If you could tailor your cloud storage solution, what features would you like to silver line it with?