1. Info-Tech Research Group1 Develop a Cloud Storage Strategy Purchase in-house storage capacity, or pay for usage in the cloud.

2. Info-Tech Research Group2 Adopting cloud storage requires little effort with a low cost entry barrier, but migration and restore can take much longer than anticipated. Introduction IT leaders and storage managers tasked with reassessing the organization’s backup architecture. IT leaders and Website owners whose organizations have high traffic Websites and want to reduce their hosting while increasing Website speed. IT leaders that are assessing Infrastructure-as-a- Service cloud computing, and the storage capabilities included in the service. Any organization looking to reduce capital expenditure and administrative burden on storage, enhance disaster recovery capabilities, or simply looking to learn more about cloud storage. This Research is Designed For:This Research Will Help You: Decide whether your organization can benefit from adopting cloud storage. Determine which use cases best suit your organization’s needs. Avoid deployment issues associated with adopting cloud storage.

3. Info-Tech Research Group3 Executive Summary Info-Tech believes almost every business can benefit from deploying cloud storage as a backup/archiving target. Restoring large files can be time consuming, but most files can be restored within a few minutes, and in some cases end users can be left to do this themselves, saving precious IT time and effort. The cautions against adopting cloud storage are very real, those being security & accountability, data & application mobility, availability & reliability, unclear business models, and location of data. While cloud storage isn’t for everyone, there has been an increase in adoption of over 326% since 2010. Organizations already using PaaS or processing IaaS should evaluate using cloud storage whenever an opportunity arises. Reducing capital expenditure and, likely, improving reliability will extend the benefits already being experienced. Any organization with media heavy Websites must evaluate cloud storage. Not only can this lead to dramatic reductions in monthly costs, but additional flexibility in how that storage is managed, and the easy addition of a content delivery network to speed media to users worldwide. Cloud storage spending is going to skyrocket – while the cloud computing market as a whole should read $10-$15 billion a year by 2013, Info-Tech predicts cloud storage will make up approximately $1 billion of cloud spending by 2013. In turn, this will make cloud storage vendors a more lucrative market to traditional storage vendors than the mid-market is today.

4. Info-Tech Research Group4 The benefits and pitfalls of cloud storage Cloud storage as a backup target Cloud storage as primary storage Cloud storage as Web content storage Deciding how and when to use cloud storage Understanding what makes up a compute cloud, and where cloud storage fits in The benefits of adopting cloud storage The pitfalls of adopting cloud storage The best uses for cloud storage

5. Info-Tech Research Group5 Cloud computing services are run on top of a compute cloud. All compute clouds share similar characteristics, regardless of the services they offer. Cloud computing is not just a marketing term; there is a defendable definition of what a compute cloud includes Abstracted compute resources (processor cycles, memory, storage) are typically derived from aggregated and virtualized commodity hardware. This aggregated and virtualized infrastructure is typically owned by an external third party vendor, and referred to as a public cloud. If the infrastructure is hosted within your organization, it’s called a private cloud. Application workloads are provisioned by these abstracted resources which are elastic (they can be scaled up and down as needed). Public cloud service customers share access to these resources (typically via the Internet) in a multi-tenant environment. When using cloud storage as a stand-alone service, customers pay only for what storage capacity is in use, not for future capacity that may be required. The underlying vendor infrastructure is typically a set of storage area networks (SANs) that are virtualized to provide, what looks like, a scale-out NAS to customers. The dynamic ability of the cloud allows us to do a ramp up and a ramp down easier than having to go out and buy five more Web servers and then decommission them for when we don’t need them. - Rory Kilkenny, Senior Systems Engineer, LBMX Storage Servers Network Infrastructure-as-a-Service IaaS (Storage, Processing) Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Cloud Services Infrastructure Compute Cloud Stack Source: Info-Tech Research Group

6. Info-Tech Research Group6 Enterprises should assess cloud storage in three situations, with backup/archiving providing the most value Backing up and archiving to cloud storage requires either a software agent running on each server/desktop that will be backed up, with backup policies customized for each device, or backup software configured to replicate your on-site backup store. The software keeps files backed up/synchronized to the cloud, and available for restore. There are inherent advantages to moving backups and archives offsite, including lowering the total cost of ownership related to storage acquisition, power, standby power, and cooling. Backups and archives are typically latency-tolerant, data-intensive, and can grow to sometimes unpredictable scales. While dedicated online backup services may be best suited for this need, all cloud storage services can be made to work when coupled with online backup software. Recommendation: Any organization evaluating purchasing additional backup or archiving capacity, or investigating off-site replication, should turn to cloud storage as a potential solution. Internet Backup StoreServers Cloud Storage Provider NAS

7. Info-Tech Research Group7 Businesses using processing IaaS must assess cloud storage in its entirety – go all in & experience maximum benefits Cloud servers provide minimal storage capacity within the cloud server itself. Typically folders can be mapped/mounted to a scale-out NAS to provide primary storage, or for running backup processes. Some vendors also provide dedicated storage services implemented in a similar manner, but with its own pricing structure. The advantages include lower storage acquisition costs, complete flexibility in the storage capacity available to the business, and pricing based on usage – not capacity. Ideally, the same vendor providing you with processing IaaS services will also provide you with storage IaaS services. Mounting/mapping a folder to another vendor’s cloud storage service is likely possible, but accessing that data when needed will be exponentially slower than accessing it within the same vendor’s infrastructure. Recommendation: Enterprises already using an IaaS cloud computing provider for production servers, or are evaluating moving some production servers to a compute cloud, must evaluate cloud storage as a primary, backup, and archiving storage target. Internet Backup StoreServers IaaS Cloud Computing Provider

8. Info-Tech Research Group8 Using cloud storage as the originating server of your Web content provides far more flexibility than using Web servers Cloud storage for Web content works by storing objects with unique ID tags and serving them to a content delivery network (CDN) for Web-delivery. Therefore, this works best with cloud storage services using HTTP Object stores, with access provided by a REST or similar API. There are inherent advantages to moving offsite, especially given the reduction of traffic to your data center; alternatively, if it’s already hosted offsite with a Web hosting company, Web hosts cannot scale to massive amounts of data without adding expensive dedicated servers, potentially providing you with far more processor power than storage capacity. End users are distributed, and the CDN caches and delivers the most frequently accessed media as close to end users as possible. It’s not important to use the same vendor for both cloud storage and the CDN. Most CDN providers do not offer cloud storage services, and vice-versa. Recommendation: Businesses requiring several virtual private servers (VPS) or dedicated servers to store their Web content will benefit from consolidating their Web content onto a cloud storage service instead, enabling a significant decrease in Web hosting costs. Servers Internet BEFORE AFTER CDN PoP

9. Info-Tech Research Group9 There has been a 326% increase in cloud storage adoption in the last 12 months All enterprises are faced with ever increasing storage requirements, especially those posed by the need for long-term storage of unstructured data. Storage costs are not driven by the costs of disks, but by the need to provide resiliency, compliance and scalability. The value proposition behind cloud storage depends on the use case: ◦ Avoiding purchasing new internal tier 1 or tier 2 storage capacity ◦ Eliminating internal tier 3 storage capacity by moving it to cloud storage ◦ Easy access from anywhere in the world Some argue that cloud computing, and specifically cloud storage, reduces an organization’s footprint. Whether this is true or not depends on many factors. n=111 n=99 Source: Info-Tech Research Group The cloud storage value proposition comes from reducing capital expenditures and eliminating tier 3 storage Enterprise storage has a high capital cost barrier to deployment where costs are driven by the need to provide resiliency, compliance and rapid scalability. I doubt that [carbon footprint] was a consideration because this [migration to cloud storage] was five or six years ago, and I would probably guess that they did not even consider the type of facility that our cloud provider has. However now, in my opinion, that is a critical point. - Bob Davis, IT Director, Rea & Associates

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