You probably feel protective of your data storage. Hands on management can provide some peace of mind, but managing a data center is not easy. It’s a full-time job. Do you need to keep all your data close at hand to keep it safe? Are there other options?
To help answer those questions, here’s a cloud storage comparison. It can help you determine where your data belongs and how to keep it safe when it gets there.
Keeping Data Storage Close at Hand
Maintenance and security woes keeping you up all night?
Some data, by nature, needs close supervision. Regulated data fits into this category, as does highly sensitive data, such as your closely-guarded proprietary secrets. Any cloud storage comparison should include an assessment of what kinds of data you have and what the best storage solution is for that type of data.
Traditionally, enterprises have kept regulated and secretive data in the on-premises data center. It’s a great setup for midnight maintenance and backups, but it also means less sleep for your IT folks. There’s a new option for on-premises data stores that need close supervision, allowing you to keep tabs on the data without the continual worry over the costs of the data center and long-term capacity planning.
If you’re worn out from the stay-up-all-night woes of the on-premises data center, consider an onsite solution like Zadara’s enterprise storage as a service solution. When you conduct a cloud storage comparison, you’ll see that this solution keeps your most sensitive data safe in your own data center, while shifting the gruel of hardware ownership to the vendor.
Moving Data to a Safe Place
For companies that are just beginning to feel their way around the cloud, the hybrid cloud solution allows them to tuck less sensitive data in the cloud, while retaining complete control of the stuff they can’t bear to be apart from.
For example, after a careful cloud storage comparison, companies might choose to place their archived or historical data in the cloud, where it’s easily accessible by applications when needed, keeping the current workloads in-house. Similarly, businesses might opt to put things like the data and applications associated with a customer-facing mobile app in the cloud, keeping their other data in house. This means your IT team can get a good night’s sleep because the cloud service provider is helping keep guard.
Time to Let Go
Cloud storage is the mature form of the data center, freeing internal IT departments to other assignments that actually generate revenue for the business.
Some enterprises stick with the hybrid cloud indefinitely. But once they learn the ease, convenience, cost-savings, and security that the cloud can provide, the usual next step is to migrate even more data into the cloud.
The cloud is the enterprise’s way of letting their data storage solution grow up. Now the business can shift the focus of their IT team to more lucrative tasks, like building and implementing innovative new technologies, while a cloud serve provider takes over the mundane daily tasks of maintaining servers, backing up data, and generally running an off-premises data center.
Start your cloud storage comparison at Zadara! Download your free copy of the On-Premise as-a-Service Lease Comparison infographic now. 
