If you are like many IT professionals, you are well aware of the huge amount of information and hype surrounding the topic of public cloud storage in the industry today. The benefits offered by public cloud storage can be substantial: significant economies of scale that deliver competitive pricing, flexible pay-for-use pricing models, reduced on-premise administration, anywhere access and the elimination of capital expenses for servers and storage. Cloud storage also frees valuable IT professionals from mundane, repetitive tasks, allowing them to focus on high-value IT projects that can not only make their jobs far more interesting but also provide the opportunity to learn valuable new technologies and deliver high-impact projects that create substantial business value for the organization.
Given all these benefits, it is sometimes hard to understand management’s reluctance to approve cloud-based projects. How do you go about making them comfortable with this new paradigm?
Selling Public Cloud Storage to Management
The key is to focus on issues that are important to management while being sensitive to the creation of any additional risk to the ongoing business. Management is interested in cost savings, productivity improvements and competitive advantages, but if these come with increased risk, they are likely to proceed with caution.
One of the most compelling reasons for using the public cloud is the move from a capital expense to an operating cost model. Instead of the organization purchasing servers and storage every three to five years and then depreciating the cost of these purchases, costs become a monthly expense when the cloud is used. Management generally prefers this method, as the costs are in sync with business activity and do not consume capital that is better invested in other areas. To understand the potential savings, it is important to understand all the costs associated with the acquisition and operation of existing hardware, such as maintenance, power and cooling equipment.
Although the cost savings from using public cloud storage may be compelling, management is unlikely to proceed if it feels that this approach creates new or additional risk. For most organizations, the availability of the public cloud is normally far higher than they can provide themselves, as cloud storage vendors have architected high availability as a core tenant of their offerings. Most small to medium-size businesses typically have limited budgets and resources to deliver truly high levels of availability. Even with cloud storage, however, it is critical that if truly high levels of availability are required, an architecture be created that allows for the failure of every component. It’s also useful to research the current level of availability—organizations commonly find they have lower availability than they initially thought.
Security of cloud storage is a top concern of management and should be addressed. With encryption offerings by some cloud storage gateway vendors, this concern has effectively been resolved. The stronger encryption in cloud storage gateway offerings should encompass data at rest as well as in flight. Provided the organization maintains control of the encryption key, data stored in the cloud under strong encryption is useless to others, even in the unlikely event someone is able access to it.
Performance can be a substantial inhibitor to the adoption of cloud storage. As most organizations have limited bandwidth to the cloud, some form of caching gateway must reside within the organization to service read and write requests at high speed. Gateways, in addition to caching recent data, also offer the advantages of deduplication and compression, which greatly reduce the amount of data that must be transmitted and stored within the public cloud—thus greatly reducing cloud storage costs and bandwidth requirements.
Disaster recovery (DR) is a topic that does not get enough attention within smaller firms. Owing to the high costs of creating a dedicated DR site, many companies simply hope for the best or make due with weekly off-site tape vaulting. Tape vaulting is a solution, but it carries a high administrative load, vaulting costs and slow restores should the tapes require recall from the vault. By implementing cloud storage gateways, a local cache speeds restore requests but also replicates data in real time to the public cloud so that backups are quickly secured off site. With weekly tape vaulting, a substantial amount of data could be lost should a disaster happen just before the tapes are transported off site.
The public cloud offers an extremely cost efficient DR site—data replicated to public cloud storage is off-site in very secure and well-designed data centers and is accessible from any location with data connectivity. A core advantage of the cloud is that it enables many applications to run in the public cloud using data that was replicated to cloud storage. In the event a site is lost or flooded, for example, the company can—instead of looking for new hardware, a compatible tape drive and a location to run this hardware—put critical systems back into production within the cloud and access these systems from any location. This capability alone can accelerate the process of recovery by several days.
Another advantage offered by the public cloud storage in the area of DR is that with the real-time replication offered by many cloud storage gateways, mission-critical data is quickly replicated to the cloud, and thus an up-to-date copy of data is safely stored off site. Tapes, in comparison, are typically rotated off-site on a weekly schedule, so a much larger amount of data is at risk. DR testing is also much easier using cloud-based systems in that the data can be easily restored to a test system either on the premises or in the cloud. Using systems in the cloud for DR testing greatly speeds and simplifies this important process and is an important point worth emphasizing to management. DR plans should be tested at least twice a year to prove recoverability.
The flexibility and scalability provided by public cloud storage are also key points to present to management. The public cloud’s pay-for-use model means that the organization pays only for the resources consumed. Should business expand as planned, cloud-related storage costs will increase with additional storage added on demand. Should plans change, however, unneeded capacity and resources can quickly be canceled, and with them the associated costs. For the public cloud, organizations costs are far closer to their requirements compared with the historical model of IT, where large systems were purchased, with the company planning to grow into and consume those resources over time. The advantage for management is that by using the cloud, the company will gain the ability to quickly scale its storage at near real time and at a cost point below that of on-premise hardware.
The last key point to emphasize to management surrounds the productivity advantage gained by using the cloud. By exploiting cloud storage, the day-to-day administration of tape- or disk-based backup systems can be eliminated. This will free up substantial amounts of IT staff time that can be applied to high-value IT projects that make a serious positive impact for the company.
Given the advantages outlined above, where is best to start? A large number of companies today are starting by using cloud storage to store their backup data sets. The reason this use case is so popular is the fast return on investment created by management savings and reduced capital expenditures. Storing backup data sets in the cloud removes the repetitive, mundane tape management and vaulting tasks, and it frees up expensive disk storage capacity. Given the size of these data sets and the rapid storage growth typical in organizations today, the savings in reclaimed storage and elimination of cost associated with purchasing additional storage is a powerful benefit. Today’s leading cloud storage gateways cache the backup data sets for fast recovery while securing and replicating this data into public cloud storage. As most restores are from recent data sets, the data will be stored within the cloud storage gateway’s cache for fast restores. Old, seldom accessed data within the cloud can also be accessed quickly, taking advantage of advanced deduplication and WAN optimization technologies that reduce the blocks of data that must be recalled while reaping the low cost per gigabyte appropriate for this class of rarely accessed data. Thus, organizations can gain all the benefits that cloud storage offers without the concerns regarding performance, security or application to cloud integration.
Public cloud storage can provide significant benefits for an organization, such as a more cost-efficient pay-as-you-go model, scalability and enhanced DR capabilities. By highlighting the advantages that public cloud storage can provide and by offering a clear plan to address concerns, you can help management quickly grasp the economic benefits of moving backup data to the cloud. This will not only provide benefits for the company but also demonstrates the analytical and business skills that might just get you that long overdue promotion.
About the Author
Jerome Noll is director of cloud storage marketing at Riverbed Technology, the IT performance company.
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About Jeff Clark
Jeff Clark is editor for the Data Center Journal. He holds a bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of Richmond as well as master’s and doctorate degrees in electrical engineering from Virginia Tech.
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