Migrating storage to the cloud offers some enticing benefits, but only if you avoid common cloud storage issues. Here are some of the biggest cloud storage issues you need to be aware of before migrating valuable data to cloud storage.
Cloud Storage Issue #1: No suitable cloud storage provider selected
The old adage is that no one is fired for choosing IBM, and when it comes to cloud storage, choose one of the two largest cloud providers: AWS or Microsoft Azure is tempting.
Although they may be the best choice for many companies, they may not be your best choice. Depending on the size of your organization, consider a small storage provider that can give you more attention.
Things to look for with other storage providers include:
Downtime history to understand their past reliability – thus indicating their future reliability.
Data accessibility, including bandwidth within the data center, between the data center and the Internet.
Their pricing structure includes fixed fees and bandwidth charges for bringing mobile data. A common cloud storage problem is to ignore how to easily scale and shrink requirements. For example, do you promise a certain amount of storage per month, or can you only pay for the amount you use every day, week, or month?
Familiar with your industry vertical. Choosing a storage provider that understands your business and possible data needs can make your life easier, and failing to choose a good provider for your industry is a cloud storage trap that may make you more than your competitors In bad situation. This is because service providers familiar with your industry may be better able to meet your industry’s usage patterns and performance requirements and demonstrate compliance with relevant industry regulations.
Cloud Storage Issue #2: Ignore the connection
Your data center may have the most advanced network running at 100Gbps or 10Gbps, and the rest of the organization may be 10Gbps, 1Gbps or even 100Mbps. However, when it comes to connecting to the Internet, your bandwidth may be much slower – possibly as low as 10Mbps – and it may be asymmetric (meaning uploading to a cloud storage provider will be slower than downloading it.)
Cloud storage gateways and other WAN-optimized devices can help alleviate the problem, but if the connection to the cloud storage provider is not sufficient, then migrating to cloud storage is unlikely to achieve high enough storage performance to achieve many potential benefits.
Cloud Storage Issue #3: No Service Level Agreement (SLA)
Most cloud storage providers will provide you with a sample SLA that outlines their obligations to you and what they will do if something goes wrong. But there’s no reason you have to accept it – IDC estimates that about 80% of cloud customers accept the sample SLAs they offer, but 20% negotiate to change the template to make sure it’s closer to meeting their needs.
For example, the provider may provide you with a “four nine” (ie 99.99%) uptime guarantee, which can be down for 50 minutes per year. But this can be calculated on an annual basis, so the service may stop for 50 minutes on the first day of the contract. You must wait until the end of the year to know if the SLA has been destroyed and you are therefore entitled to any compensation.
At the same time, you must bear any loss yourself. In order to avoid this cloud storage problem, it is possible to negotiate within 50 minutes per year. If it can better meet your business needs, it should not exceed (for example) 15 minutes per month.
Cloud Storage Issue #4: Overestimating the compensation that providers may receive when they violate SLAs
It’s tempting to think of an SLA as an insurance policy: as long as you meet the SLA’s terms, your business will survive. If it doesn’t meet your requirements, you’ll be there because your cloud storage provider will provide it. The impact of related compensation on violations.
But this is not the case, this is a common cloud storage problem. In most cases, violations are in the form of service credits (ie, months of free storage), and in the case of serious violations – such as all data loss – you should expect the most to pay your annual contract value in currency Three to four times. In many cases, this is completely different from the cost of losing so much data to your business.
Of course, it’s possible to negotiate a higher compensation from your cloud storage provider, but you may need to pay more for storage. In most cases, buying insurance from a third party may be cheaper.
Cloud Storage Issue #5: Unable to Monitor SLAs Effectively
Working with cloud storage providers adds another layer of complexity between business users who use corporate data and the data itself. The IT department that monitors the SLA is in the middle.
A common cloud storage flaw in data access issues is that users or business units may bypass the IT department and go directly to the cloud storage provider’s help desk to resolve problems as they occur. If this happens, you don’t have to rely on the provider to log every problem that occurs, which means that you can’t actually monitor the SLA accurately. Avoiding this cloud storage trap comes down to educating users, and your IT service desk should be their first point of contact in all situations.
Cloud Storage Issue #6: Failure to clearly understand how to get data or move it to another provider
Cloud storage providers may fall down so that you can easily provide them with data first—either by collecting physical media such as hard drives from the data center or by providing free data entry over a network connection. However, if you decide that you no longer need to use the provider’s services, you can often have unexpectedly difficult or expensive problems.
In order to avoid this cloud storage trap, it is important to get a satisfactory answer to the following questions:
*How is your data available over a network connection or can it be collected on a physical storage medium?
* How long will it appear – do you have to wait a few days or weeks?
* How much bandwidth can I use if you plan to download data? This is important because even with a 1Gbps link, it takes nearly two weeks to return 150TB of data from the cloud storage provider to your data center.
* What bandwidth costs are involved if you move back data over the network, and what is the cost of placing it on physical media?
* How long does it take for your copy and backup of your data to be deleted, and can you expect an official confirmation that all copies have been deleted?
* In what format will the data be provided – is it provided in a .csv file or in a more closed format?
Cloud Storage Issue #7: Assume that using a cloud storage provider removes all your security responsibilities
Cloud providers should be experts in the work they do, including keeping the cloud and the data in it secure. However, if there is a data security breach, your customer will be liable and seek compensation, and you will suffer embarrassment, loss of reputation and possible business loss.
This means that in order to avoid this cloud storage problem, you need to conduct due diligence and ensure that the cloud storage provider provides the security that is sufficient for your needs. To do this, you need to know as much as possible about existing security measures and certified compliance guidelines and regulations (eg HIPPA, PCI-DSS, SSAE 16).
Cloud Storage Issue #8: Determine costs without considering other factors
For many companies, one of the key drivers for moving to cloud computing is to reduce costs , or at least convert from a single large capital expenditure to a small regular operating expense. While this may be beneficial from a business perspective, it’s important to remember that in addition to changing the payment method, you have to pay something fundamentally different.
In other words, cloud storage is different from existing data center storage, and in addition to new security, compliance, and accessibility challenges, new performance characteristics need to be considered. In summary, some of the applications you run in the data center are not sensitive to performance and are ideal for use with cloud storage. This is not the case for other situations.
This means that if you decide to use cloud storage for later applications, the application itself may also have to run in a cloud close to cloud storage. This, in turn, means that migrating data to cloud storage may need to be part of a larger consideration of the feasibility of migrating some or all of the applications to the cloud.
Original Article Source from https://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/cloud-storage/8-cloud-storage-problems-how-to-avoid-them.html