www.smestorage.com - Cloud Service Broker
Without a doubt DropBox introduced Cloud Storage to the masses via reliable sync replication to the extent that now the Market for file storage has exploded, companies are looking at ways to implement their own Enterprise DropBox type on-premise or hybrid Cloud such as that offered here http://smestorage.com/?p=static&page=ownFileserver Why on-premise? There are a variety of reasons: 1. Users from countries outside of the USA are wary of the Patriot Act, which over-rides Safe Harbour and gives US government bodies the right of search and seizure for data stored on servers hosted on a US Inc. 2. Privacy: Users want to be able to control access to their Cloud Data and they want data retention of certain data to be on their premises for data that they consider sensitive. 3. Companies are wary of Cloud Vendors offering encryption of data that in which the key is not held by them. There have been various high profile examples http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/05/internet_security of vendor security descriptions being less than accurate. 4. Most of the vendors offer silo'd implementations of Cloud Storage. This means that they have to move their data to their infrastructure and buy into the vendors SaaS service and pricing. This type of lock does not sit well with most companies. How do they get their data
out if prices rise? What do they do if SLA's get breached, how easy is it to move? What about Cloud Outages (link: http://blog.smestorage.com/?p=2132). Often companies also have any forms of data from different services, how do they deal with this? This is actually one of the benefits of using an on-premise Cloud Service brokers that federate public and private data and provides a unified view for data access and management. Implementing this type of hybrid cloud solution (link: http://smestorage.com/? p=static&page=ownFileserver) for your own company need not be that difficult. It can be as simple as hosting a VMWare appliance, adding the public and private clouds to be federated and presented in a single view, and then choosing whether to integrate with an incumbent Active Directory Solution for single sign-on whilst choosing Cloud Governance (link: http://blog.smestorage.com/?p=1957) and auditing options. More information on implementing such a hybrid cloud solution can be found in this White paper (link: http://bit.ly/MjETSV).