How to Select the Right Cloud Storage for Your Company

When a CIO or CTO creates an enterprise cloud strategy, it’s important for that person to take a bottom-up approach. This means that storage—where all the data resides—must be a primary consideration because it underpins the performance and reliability of the subsequent cloud services the organization uses. However, selecting a cloud storage provider is almost always problematic. There are so many vendors claiming nearly identical value propositions that it can be extremely difficult to determine true enterprise-grade storage from lesser packages. Knowing the most important criteria can help ensure that IT makes the correct decision. This eWEEK slide show, using industry perspective from Milan Sheti, general manager of HPE Storage and Big Data, offers eight tips for determining if a solution makes the (enterprise) grade.

Visibility is essential to creating an effective cloud strategy, but most cloud services provide very little insight into what’s going inside their cloud, let alone any data remaining on-premises. During the planning phase, organizations should emphasize the importance of being able to see across clouds and on-premises, as well as up and down the stack.

It’s important to begin future-proofing early; ensure compatibility between existing on-premises infrastructure and the cloud storage solution selected, so that data can be easily transferred between clouds and on-premises hardware.

When formulating a cloud strategy, companies should have a clear understanding of where they will house each application and what level of service-level agreement is required for each.

Solutions exist that allow organizations to split workloads, so IT can take advantage of the benefits of multiple clouds at once. By deploying separate clouds for both compute and storage, IT teams can optimize the environment according to the individual needs of each application.  

IT executives must ask the right questions when assessing cloud storage providers. Watch out for lock-in and data egress charges, and make sure to evaluate how easy it is to switch cloud providers or reclaim your data back on-premises.

Companies are starting to migrate mission-critical workloads developed for on-premises deployments into the cloud, making features such as snapshotting, cloning and clustering available in certain public cloud offerings.

Ask what the annual failure rate is. If it’s anywhere in the ballpark of 0.2 percent, as it is for most cloud storage services, run! Enterprise storage services are available with data durability rates millions of times better than that.

Watch out for vendors of vendors touting half-hearted public-cloud solutions that add complexity with additional hardware or software or ones that are covertly trying to sell more hardware for private cloud. This means an organization’s best defense is to ask the right questions, cut through the marketing mumbo jumbo and get straight to the facts.