As data capacity grows within the organization, so does the importance of that data. Today’s businesses depend on data for customer relationship management and marketing, operational intelligence, business intelligence, and even planning and forecasting for the future. However, as the capacity and the value of the data has grown, users are faced with a significant challenge: how can we store and manage all of it? Today, businesses have a variety of options to store their data using either on-premises or cloud-based solutions, depending on things like budget, regulatory issues, and the preferred IT infrastructure. With advancements in connectivity and security, cloud storage can provide a level of performance and security that rivals onsite solutions. Learn how to solve your top enterprise storage problems by moving to the cloud.
Exponential Data Growth and Disruptive Storage Upgrades
Data can be storage either on-premises solutions, in cloud-based solutions, or in hybrid solutions, including some on-premises storage and some storage in the cloud.
Data growth is exponential. In fact, it is outright explosive, especially in IT environments that are utilizing data from social media, the IoT, and other high-volume data producers. With solutions in the cloud, businesses can upgrade their data storage without causing any downtime. Cloud storage is scalable and flexible, and acquiring additional storage or adding new features doesn’t disrupt the workflow at all.
Low Utilization of Existing Assets
The cloud scales upward immediately, whenever more space is needed. The customer never has to worry about running out of storage space, or investing in more capacity than they need at any given time. The cloud’s pay-as-you-go business model means businesses can scale their data operations upward or downward, only paying for what is actually used. Although capacity planning is typically a significant issue for businesses that choose on-premises storage, Zadara Storage On-Premise as-a-Service (OPaaS) offers all the benefits of the cloud (flexibility, scalability, managed services). With Zadara OPaaS, we put our cloud solution in your data center giving you the best of both worlds.
Growing Management Complexity With Flat or Decreasing Budgets for IT Staff Head Count
Data management has become a much more complex issue, but IT staffs are not growing at a pace capable of keeping up. When you migrate to cloud storage, you can manage and monitor far more data, without having to put an extra burden on IT. Data management and monitoring is much simpler in the cloud, and the preventative maintenance is built right into the product. Zadara Storage as a Service with VPSA scales to any capacity level needed and uses cloud architecture.
Increasingly High Costs to Acquire, Run and Manage Storage
Data storage requires resources to house and maintain — including qualified personnel, power, and security. The cloud keeps all of these costs low, while sacrificing nothing in terms of data management and security.
One of the benefits of using cloud storage is that the storage costs can be moved from the CapEx side of the ledger to the OpEx side. This makes it easier to get storage costs approved and simpler to prove an ROI for investments made in technology. Storage is now available as a service, making it easier to manage fluctuating costs over time.
Achieving Cost-Effective Business Continuity and Data Protection
While virtualization is not necessarily the cloud, the cloud does leverage virtualization in order to distribute workloads across various servers, so that the performance is kept high as work is distributed to the servers with the most available resources at any given time. Combine this with Snapshots, Replication, and Mirroring, and you can see why the cloud is able to provide smooth, seamless business continuity.
Providing the Highest Levels of Security
As long as you choose a cloud vendor that offers true enterprise-grade security, your data is as secure in the cloud as it would be on your premises. Be sure that you retain the ownership of the data, not the cloud provider, and also ask about encryption methods, both for data at rest and for data in transit. Also, find out if your data will be stored on dedicated drives, so that you are not mingling data with other customers.
TToday’s cloud storage is immensely scalable, flexible, affordable, and secure. Find out the true power and potential of cloud storage when you download the Zadara Storage Cloud whitepaper. 
