It is important for businesses to find the right architecture to suit their data storage needs. The benefit of public cloud storage is that data storage is managed and controlled off-premise by a cloud service provider, without the need to install hardware within the organization. Nevertheless, major concerns revolve around transporting data or business assets out of the on-premise data storage and to the cloud.
How is data transferred to the cloud:
To extend data to the public cloud, organizations can use their internal applications. The data extended to the cloud might be data that doesn’t need to be accessed frequently, and the time lapse to extend the data back from the cloud to users in the organization outweighs the cost of storing the data internally. Cloud Storage providers use APIs to transfer data to the cloud. Data cloud integration time can range from a few days to a few weeks. Organizations can use in-house developers for the data move or outsourced developers that help get the data to the cloud. There are many providers that offer full data services for moving organizations’ data to the cloud, they provide a hardware component or a software application that can be loaded to the organization’s servers, these devices use the on-premise storage and bandwidth to transfer the data to the cloud. On-premise storage is used as cache, when users across the company access data and modify it; the new data is stored on the on-premise storage for easy access, and bandwidth allows old unused data to be moved to the cloud. This allows on-premise storage to remain small and inexpensive. If the needed data is already transferred to the cloud, or cloud storage has been used as primary storage, it is advisable to have cloud data storage grouped as smaller data files, so user can access smaller subset of data, this will decrease the latency to data access from the cloud.
Which business Data should be moved to the cloud, which should be kept in archive and backup storage?
Data that people in the organization deem critical and needs to be secured should remain on-premise storage. In addition, data that should be readily accessible and often called back from the cloud should also remain internal, as a result older unused data can be migrated to the cloud. In time, when a user will want access to that data, he will be the only user impacted by the latency. Another aspect to consider is the organization internal storage capabilities, and the cost of transferring data to and from the cloud to the local storage.
