There was a time when companies were only backing up their data to onsite servers as a backup solution. Some companies eventually started having their business data backed up to an off-site server to avoid a disaster due to natural calamities, but backing up to off-site servers can be time consuming. In order to overcome this issue, seed backups are performed often for full backups and incremental copies are transferred over the internet.
Onsite and offsite backups are now something from the past. The virtualization and cloud revolution has since transformed the storage industry. While virtualization reduced the cost of construction and maintenance of hardware, the cloud provided a solid platform for virtualization.
Though cloud based business services were started in 1994 (by AT&T), it wasn’t until 2006 that cloud based storage services were first offered when Amazon introduced Amazon Web Services (AWS). From then on, companies started migrating their storage to the cloud. Though the initial period of cloud services was passive, since many companies were using it as a source of storage. The introduction of virtualization technology and cloud based services by top players on industry (Microsoft, VMWare etc.,) made SMBs start to look to the cloud as their storage solution.
Why Cloud?
This is the foremost question of companies that are using traditional onsite and offsite servers as their storage solution. This is easily solved with the answer of cost efficiency and promised data durability. It also avoids the space and cost requirement for backup servers and their hardware needs.
Cost Efficiency:
In its early stage of introduction, cloud storage costs were a bit high as there were only a minimal range of consumers using it. Eventually with increased user count and deployment of technologies like Hyper V and VMWare selecting cloud platforms as a solution for service,costs were reducedto a range much less than the maintenance cost of traditional backup servers. This invitedmany SMBs to choose cloud as their backup solution.
Security & Business Continuity:
Amazon AWS promises security policies that secures customer data with military level protection and they were in compliance with HIPAA, HITECH ACT on US. They are also in compliance with respective areas of EU and APAC based compliance acts. This assures customers trust over amazon storage service.
When a customer backs up their business data to amazon cloud, they are also promised to have redundant copies of their data backup stored in distinct geographical locations which assures restore of backed up data in the case of a natural calamity.
All being said, Data Storage over the cloud can be concluded as a promising profit and this will incur more profit going forward with even less cost per GB, as the user count over the cloud will increase rapidly like never before in 2015.
