Ten Factors to Consider When Moving to the Cloud
One of the primary objections that IT organizations have when it comes to the adoption of cloud storage is a lack of control over the service being provided. Thanks to snapshot software available using storage systems deployed within the data center, a lot of IT organizations have become very adept at managing storage.
Now CloudSigma, a provider of public cloud storage services, wants to provide the same level of granular control over cloud storage at no extra cost. At the Storage Visions 2014 conference today, CloudSigma added a snapshot management capability to its all solid-state drive (SSD) public cloud service that allows IT organizations to easily clone SSDs between sites or apply policies to groups of SSDs.
CloudSigma CEO Robert Jenkins says the ability to apply policies to a public cloud service is especially significant because when IT organizations invoke these same capabilities within their own data center, they usually have to pay a premium for additional software to manage the process. In contrast, Jenkins says CloudSigma is not only providing these capabilities as part of its base service, they don’t require the skills of a dedicated storage administrator to invoke. Instead, the snapshot can be made via either the console CloudSigma provides or the application programming interface the cloud storage service publishes.
While there are still a lot of regulatory issues that may affect the usage of public cloud services, it’s become apparent that at least the enterprise-class services are starting to provide IT organizations with more granular control over the overall environment. There might always be more control within a provide cloud running on a data center managed directly by the internal IT organization. But as the level of control that exists between a private and public cloud computing service continues to narrow, so too does the number of legitimate objections to using a public cloud service.
Of course, not all public cloud computing services are created equal in terms of both the level of control they provide and usage of advanced technologies such as SSDs. But as public cloud computing continues to mature, it’s clear that the level of control over those services that internal IT organizations should expect to have is rising considerably.
