How Businesses Can Manage Data with Cloud Storage Systems

How Businesses Can Manage Data with Cloud Storage Systems

Data conversion services and cloud storage solutions are great ways of managing data. Here are some ways to manage cloud-based data effectively.

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The growth of data as the business grows puts immense pressure on enterprises and IT managers with regard to secure storage of data. Many organizations still have paperbased data that is even more challenging and costly to store. A practical solution for businesses is conversion of data with the support of data conversion services and utilization of an efficient cloud storage system. This helps to reduce costs and also ensure efficient storage of critical data. In a cloud storage system, data is stored on remote servers and made available to users from anywhere over the Internet. This helps avoid the need for physical storage of data.

In recent years, use of cloud service has increased drastically and businesses are increasingly using Drop Box, Google Drive etc. According to a Forbes article, around 70 percent of organizations have at least one app in the cloud today and the data storage is expected to be a top motivator for cloud adoption in the future. The advantages of cloud storage system are: •

Access the required data from anywhere at anytime

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Eliminates the need for costly infrastructure

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Prevents data loss due to any disaster and ensures data security

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Better corporate flexibility and agility

So, businesses are greatly pushing themselves to turn digital and adopt cloud system to ensure better workflow of operations. However, transitioning to the cloud may be challenging because there are many complexities involved. Digital transformation has become a major priority for organizations because of the increase in the number of dataintensive apps and infrastructure migrations to the cloud. Business CEOs are also under tremendous pressure to advance in digital business. A clear understanding of the issues associated with cloud migration would be very beneficial.

The first thing to understand is how the cloud infrastructure will affect their data access and associated applications. Apps are a common feature for most organizations and before migrating these to the cloud, they may have to be rewritten or modified. If the cloud migration is to be smooth, proper planning and the right platform are indispensable. Here are some ways to address the challenges posed by the cloud. ✓

Tiered storage: Managing data in the cloud is highly expensive and complex.

The IT team must find ways to make data easily searchable. Moving data to the cloud may be easy but getting the same data back is an expensive affair.

Accumulation of old data is challenging, and such data is of no use to the business. Such aged data in the cloud will only increase costs and create data sprawl. Data tiering is one way to reduce costs on cloud resources. It lets you

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sort through data and move any inactive data from the server and allows you to keep the cloud free for active data with minimum processing. Such data tiering allows data to be automatically offloaded to cloud storage while keeping all metadata locally present. The data encrypted ensures safety while moving to and from the cloud. This is a completely automated and affordable way of managing cold data. It also removes the need for archiving software and cloud gateways with no complexities for IT teams. ✓

Ensure fool-proof security: Cloud providers understand the importance of security of data and being compliant with the regulations, but it is important for businesses also to ensure data security. Companies must use data platforms that have built-insecurity features with encryption, risk management and access control unified across all the applications. If security flaws exist, there is the risk of data breaches, malware attacks, denial of service and other attacks.

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Minimize data sprawl: Some companies choose a single cloud environment whereas some others opt for multi-cloud strategy. This is because some workloads work better in certain environments. But most companies do not go with one big cloud migration project. When apps and data are spread across various cloud services, companies may end up with silos of data and analytics which could affect productivity and data integrity. Connecting data and analytics can minimize the risk of data sprawl. A platform like the Converged Data Platform (CDP) helps IT teams to run clusters of data worldwide and have access to a consolidated view into the files that are in different physical locations. This gives IT teams the ability to avoid data silos that result in data sprawl. IT teams should avoid rewriting software every time an application has a new destination for a particular cloud provider or a new platform. This could also reduce the cost of managing cloud-based data.

A number of businesses are already utilizing cloud storage solutions and benefiting from it. However, the right platform, right provider and high security measures are important for enterprises to avoid data braches, malware attacks, denial of service attacks etc that can compromise sensitive data. Therefore, businesses have to be very careful when choosing outsourced solutions including cloud storage.

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