Cloud storage: A rosy future – once the thorns are removed

The Cloud Optimization Survey, conducted by Gatepoint Research, found that 80 percent of respondents are already using a degree of cloud storage. When asked which was the most important benefit of cloud storage, the reasoning was less clear.

The most popular reason for implementation was to take advantage of scalability and flexibility, closely followed by managing data growth and reducing capital costs. Consolidation of data centre resources was also cited but reducing staff numbers was the lowest priority.
The importance of scalability is hardly surprising because increasing the size of adata centre’s storage facility is always fraught with challenges. Apart from the cost of hardware, drives have to be deployed and maintained – that is assuming there is still space in the data centre to add the extra racks. With cloud, the process of expansion can be automated or at least reduced to notifying the service provider that more capacity will be required. Deployment and maintenance issues simply disappear.

In private clouds, physical scalability issues may not disappear but as a facility increases in size traffic issues can slow performance. This remains true in any cloud whether it is public, private or a hybrid of the two. This is where optimization can be used to improve performance and consequently increase scalability. Data sovereignty is a new phrase for an old concern: where the data is located for storage and which country’s jurisdiction covers the data centre. Apart from the legal implications, there is a related concern over distance travelled and the latency introduced to the system. Performance is of particular concern for users and WAN latency was cited by 67 percent as being a key concern when using public cloud – but this does not appear to be a deal-killer. The choice of cloud delivery options is a question of balancing such pros and cons.This is borne out by the research because the split between public and private deployments is almost equal, with 37 percent of respondents using public and 35 percent private, with both claiming scalability benefits.

In the future this balance could change because in the next five years 45 percent of the sample said that they are looking towards public cloud for services provision. Only 29 percent are considering private and 22 percent think hybrid services will provide a solution.
Proof that the move to cloud is gaining momentum is also shown in the figures relating to strategic planning. Although only 21 percent have a formal plan in operation, this is boosted by 43 percent who are currently developing a strategy and an awakening among another 17 percent to investigating cloud’s potential benefits. Altogether that gives a potential 81 percent who could soon be entering or expanding their services adoption.

Cloud embraces a wide range of services and applications but uppermost in mind of the adopters appears to be disaster recovery and business continuity solutions (63%). In general areas, application provision is the most popular (55%) among current adopters. Next in line is storage (47%), followed by on-demand compute and processing (36%). If current company plans come to fruition, this order will not change but the differential between the three areas will even out a little as on-demand catches up a little on the other two.
The future looks rosy but there are still barriers to adoption. Security has been an issue since cloud was first mooted and remains the top concern with 85 percent of the sample. Performance bottlenecks
as a cloud is scaled up concerned half of the respondents but this
could be slightly misleading with so many people using remote services for backup rather than transactional applications. With
two-way traffic applications on the rise, the bottleneck concerns
could show an increase.
Who will be the beneficiaries of the impending spend on cloud services? It seems that Amazon is a long way in front with 52 percent of the vote. Trailing behind is Microsoft Azure at 22 percent and Rackspace, Google and Verizon/Terremark following up a few points behind. After that comes a long drop to the smallerplayers such as Nirvanix and Joyent with one or two percent. This could reflect the respondents’ concerns about vendor longevity which came second to securityin the list of barriers to adoption.

Concerns have been somewhat confirmed in the implementors’ minds with the liquidation of 2e2, one of the top ten UK service providers. This left customers unable to access their data unless they could raise almost £1 million to keep the data centre running and that it would take 16 weeks to transfer all the data.

Perhaps incidents like this will fuel the naysayers – also an apparent barrier that refuses to go away. When asked about cloud implementation plans, there was still a significant 19 percent that admitted to having no plans to move in that direction. When asked about how big a part resistance to change played in cloud adoption, the repondents rated it at 3.21 on a scale rising from one to five in perceived resistance.

The overall message transmitted through the Cloud Optimization Survey is that cloud has broken through to be an accepted part of any future IT architecture, but there are still challenges that have not been addressed to the satisfaction of potential and current adopters.
In the light of corporate governance and financial regulation constraints, security remains one of the main barriers to total acceptance across all business processes.

The next concern is the speed of access for applications. Optimization should be a part of any service that involves constant bidirectional access to data. Latency is of particular interest for public cloud access but, even in local private clouds, the problems of speedy access to large information stores ca be vastly improved by using optimization tools and hardware.

Although the survey did not directly address the legal terms and conditions of contracts, there is evidence in the concerns about vendor longevity to show that an exit strategy is an important part of any agreement. If the service provider goes into administration, there should be some insurance that data can be accessed and migrated in a timely manner without operational disruption. Failure to do this can be expensive and could even bring down, or cause severe reputation damage, several customers in a domino effect following the closure of a service provider’s facilities.

“There’s no question that data storage is moving quickly toward the cloud,” said Ron Bianchini, president and CEO of Avere Systems. “It is extremely important to have a cloud strategy in place. The question now becomes whether to choose the public cloud, the private cloud or a combination of the two. We’re finding that security, cost, flexibility and efficiency are the deciding factors for businesses when choosing which cloud model to go with.”

To compile the report, Gateway distributed a Cloud Optimization Strategies survey to 100 executives, with 51 percent working for companies with annual revenues over $1.5 billion, and 21 percent whose revenues were under $250 million. The sample comprised 38 percent in the CxO, vice president, and director bands and the rest being classed as managers who all responded voluntarily and not in answer to telemarketing efforts.