Moving to the Cloud Seems Like a Good Idea, Taking Everything You Have Does Not
Moving to the cloud is cool. Cloud storage is a hot technology for good reason – it can save you money! It seems fairly simple, consume and pay for only what you need. Cloud storage saves you the cost of pre-purchasing storage in anticipation of your needs and the associated operating costs for space, staffing and operating that storage. Most organizations are trying to reduce total storage costs while facing 50% annual data growth rates and there is an increased demand to store data long term. As cloud storage increasingly becomes a part of IT storage strategies, customers expect a highly cost-effective, secure, and scalable solution that provides seamless access to their data.
It’s no secret there are challenges when it comes to cloud storage, but storing duplicate data shouldn’t be one of them. New deduplication technologies can increase efficiency and drive down costs of storing data in the cloud. With a deduplication engine in the cloud architecture, it is possible to determine if data already exists in the cloud. If the dedupe engine finds specific data already in the cloud, it will not resend that data saving both storage capacity and network bandwidth. Cloud implementations save storage costs and enable the enterprise to take advantage of CAPEX and OPEX savings by reducing storage purchases and the overhead necessary to manage that storage. When data deduplication technology is implemented into cloud storage solutions, it can effectively reduce the amount of data stored by 5-35X which in turn can be reflected in the costs to implement cloud storage as a part of your IT strategy. With these cost reductions, it’s no wonder dedupe technology is becoming a “must have” requirement in order to maintain an economically sound IT business model.
Is dedupe ready for the cloud? Deduplication technology has evolved to become a viable technology for use in any storage environment. Today’s deduplication technology can scale to multiple petabytes and does not impact performance. Flexible deployment options enable the cloud supplier to implement deduplication in many different models while enabling them to realize the cost benefits of deduplication which can in turn work into the business model.
According to a recent survey by FutureCloudComputing.net, 40% of people are in the experimental phase of cloud computing. This provides the opportunity to experiment with data deduplication, if you are not already implementing this technology in your in-house storage. On the other hand, 26% of people are waiting for the practice of cloud computing to mature. No need to sit around and wait for that, go ahead and drive that maturity growth yourself. How? Dedupe. It’s time for some fall cleaning, folks. Let’s get rid of the duplicate data before you send your data to the cloud!