IT managers have a lot to consider when migrating data storage to the cloud. Ongoing research highlights continued momentum toward cloud storage, but also reveals underlying reservations on the part of companies about exactly how far to go.
In spite of these hesitations, the drift toward the cloud appears unstoppable for now. According to the latest research from the Evaluator Group , levels of off-premise data storage will grow by a rate of 20-30% over the next two years.
IT managers cite a variety of reasons for adopting some level of cloud storage, with disaster recovery topping the list.
However, it is a cautious embrace of the cloud for many. The majority of spending on storage remains on-premise, while the outlook for spending allocations over a longer horizon is unclear.
“47% of IT personnel remained uncertain with regard to where the greater percentage of storage spending will fall over the long run—data center or public cloud,” said Camberley Bates, managing director at Evaluator Group. “As they embrace public cloud, they continue to experience barriers to adoption such as network bandwidth and interoperability.”
The factors motivating the migration to the cloud are also complex, with disaster recovery at the top of the list. Other reasons include data protection, data archiving, analytics, application mobility, content distribution, and testing.
HYBRID: THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS?
Most analysts agree it is not an either-or situation for companies considering a move to the cloud. Recent reports from the Uptime Institute and enterprise cloud solutions provider Nutanix point to a growing acceptance of hybrid IT among data center operators.
“Hybrid IT is now the norm, creating technology, organizational, and management complexity,” the Uptime Institute said in its assessment.
For its part, Nutanix confirmed a reluctance among IT managers to shift the bulk of data center operations to the cloud.
Nonetheless, the benefits of the cloud are evident for most companies. The prospect of avoiding large-scale capital expenses and the ability to access advanced data services such as replication and encryption offered by cloud service providers continues to appeal.
Interestingly, the Evaluator Group found that in 75% of the use cases it identified for migrating, cloud storage ended up costing companies more. In spite of this, the majority of respondents still believed the total additional cost was, on balance, worth it.
RESPONSIBILITY FOR BACK UPS
The group’s research comes as experts remind IT managers to continue to back up and otherwise protect data after a cloud migration. While the CSPs are generally responsible for the security of the cloud infrastructure, the ongoing protection of data against unwanted deletion or attack sits with the data owner.
This is a warning too many companies are apparently not heeding. According to a survey by data backup firm N2WS, almost half of respondents had no or insufficient data protection measures in place in the cloud.
“If a customer accidentally terminates a workload without having a backup copy, AWS assumes no responsibility. The shared responsibility model clearly states that the customer data in AWS along with the platform, operating system, and security settings are all customer responsibilities,” said Andrew Langsam, COO of N2WS. “This includes ensuring that your AWS environment is secure and protected.”
It all comes back to good planning around data security and disaster recovery as organizations prepare to migrate storage to the cloud. Writing recently for Information Week, Steven Weil, security director of investment advisory firm Point B, insisted on the need for companies to be upfront and comprehensive in their security preparations. According to Weil, organizations must
- Ensure clear controls around their cloud migration—who is the point person for the move, and who carries the final responsibility inside the company?
- Encrypt all data being sent and stored to the cloud.
- Lock down the fine detail of service-level agreements and contracts with their cloud service provider.
Companies need to understand exactly the agreement they are entering into, and the nature of their responsibilities under it, Weil said.
PLANNING FOR DECOMMISSIONING
It’s not simply sufficient to plan for what happens in the cloud. Companies must also plan for what to do with hardware and infrastructure left on-premise. Can it be repurposed for other uses in the enterprise, or does it make financial and operational sense to retire hardware assets?
If the latter, you may be asking yourself: How comfortable am I with the necessary steps in decommissioning parts of my data center? Do I have a sufficiently robust checklist in place? And what will I do with hardware such as drives I no longer need?
Hard disk drives can play a central role in supporting a circular economy and returning value to your organization.
The case of what to do with retiring drives is particularly interesting and often overlooked. There are an estimated 19 to 24 million HDDs available for value recovery from data centers in North America, according to analysis from storage expert Tom Coughlin. That’s a lot of data to wipe securely but also a lot of potential value to extract from those hard drives where they can be remarketed.
When researching a vendor to assist with your IT asset disposition (ITAD) needs, look for relevant industry accreditations such as those offered by ADISA that stipulate rigorous standards in data sanitization methods. By adhering to best industry practices, hard disk and solid state drives can not only be securely wiped but return value to organizations through resale in the secondary market.
Companies are often quick to miss this opportunity and rush to destruction when remarketing is possible.
“Many fully functioning HDDs are destroyed because of data security concerns, even when the data on the HDDs is of low sensitivity or could easily be erased/sanitized,” experts for the International Electronics Manufacturing Initiative (iNEMI) wrote in a 2017 report on the important role HDDs can play in developing a circular economy for electronic hardware.
“This significant loss of potential value is caused by a lack of understanding and knowledge of the full capabilities of modern data sanitization methods.”
The more time and planning you put into decommissioning your data center, the more secure and the most cost effective your transition will be.
ASSESSING THE COSTS
There is little doubt that IT professionals are increasingly looking at ways of shifting spending on storage out of the data center and into the cloud.
A separate survey of 374 IT professionals and managers by Enterprise Storage Forum found that the majority of respondents expect to invest in public cloud in the next couple of years, significantly more than any other storage technology.
Nonetheless, it remains important to fully assess all aspects of security and cost, not just now but into the future, when considering a cloud service provider.
“Think about how you use your data,” says Stephen Buckler of Horizon Technology. “When Dropbox started off it made sense to use AWS, but as it grew the cost of AWS was a drag on its P&L. By bringing the data center in-house they saved $75 million over two years.”
Fluctuations in hardware pricing are an additional consideration, as are the potentially expensive egress fees levied by the CSPs.
“Will anticipated increased availability and price drops in memory and storage, combined with easy-to-use hypervisor solutions such as Nutanix, give companies pause to rethink their cloud strategy and the impact on their P&L?” Buckler asks.
A DISTRIBUTED LANDSCAPE
One thing for sure is that data generation will continue to increase with breakneck speed and further balloon the market for storage capacity. Most analysts agree that hybrid solutions are the most sustainable approach to support the levels of agility that organizations need to drive their workloads and power their services.
Writing in a recent blog post, Kaustubh Das, vice president of product management at Cisco, said IT must extend accelerated computing “at the right scale to the right locations across an increasingly distributed landscape” in order for the data center to follow the data.
“In other words, the data center (and the multicloud infrastructure) is where the data is—and there is an increasing need for data to be processed across a spectrum of locations from the core of the datacenter to the edge.”
Not that working within a hybrid environment is without pitfalls. Things can quickly get lost between the cracks. To counter this, experts advise companies to assign ownership to a dedicated point of contact across a hybrid, multi-cloud infrastructure and not have high-level accountability spread across numerous stakeholders.
From every angle, the future of data storage for companies of all sizes is becoming more complex, of grander scale, and of increasingly critical importance, and these factors show no signs of abating in the coming years.
“Think about how you use your data. When Dropbox started off it made sense to use AWS, but as it grew the cost of AWS was a drag on its P&L. By bringing the data center in-house they saved $75 million over two years.” – Stephen Buckler
