Cloud storage

Cloud storage is a cloud computing model that allows data and files to be stored online through a cloud computing provider, accessible via the public internet or a dedicated private network connection. The provider stores, manages, and securely maintains the storage servers, infrastructure, and network to ensure you have access to your data when you need it, with virtually unlimited scale and flexible capacity. Cloud storage eliminates the need to purchase and manage your own data storage infrastructure, giving you flexibility, scalability, and stability. It also allows you to access your data anytime, anywhere.

Why is cloud storage important?
Cloud storage offers scalable and affordable storage. There's no need to worry about running out of capacity, maintaining storage area networks, replacing broken hardware, adding infrastructure as demand increases, or running unused hardware when it does. Cloud storage is flexible, meaning you can scale it up or down as needed and only pay for what you use. It's a convenient way for organizations to securely store data online so it can be accessed anytime, anywhere by those with the necessary permissions.
Whether you're a small business or a large enterprise, cloud storage can offer flexibility, cost savings, security, and simplicity, allowing you to focus on growing your core business. For small businesses, there's no need to worry about allocating expensive resources to manage storage capacity themselves. Cloud storage gives them the ability to scale as their business grows.
For larger organizations with billions of files and petabytes of data, they can rely on the scalability, stability, and cost savings of cloud storage to create centralized data warehouses that allow everyone to access data as needed.

How does cloud storage work?
Cloud storage is provided by a cloud service provider that owns and manages data storage capacity by maintaining large data centers in multiple locations around the world. Cloud storage providers manage the capacity, security, and stability of data to make your applications available over the internet through a pay-per-use model. You can typically connect to cloud storage over the internet or a dedicated private connection using a web portal, website, or mobile app. When customers purchase cloud storage from providers, they delegate most of the data storage responsibilities to the provider, including capacity, security, data availability, storage servers, computing resources, and network data delivery. Applications access cloud storage through traditional storage protocols or directly using an API. The cloud storage provider may also offer custom services that help collect, manage, secure, and analyze data on a massive scale.

What are the use cases for cloud storage?
Cloud storage encompasses multiple use cases in application management, data management, and business continuity. Let's explore some examples below.

Analytics and Data Warehouses
Traditional on-premises storage solutions can struggle in terms of cost, performance, and scalability, especially over time. Analytics requires large-scale, secure, and highly available storage pools, commonly referred to as data warehouses.
Data warehouses in object stores retain information in its original form and include detailed metadata that allows selective use and extraction for analysis. Cloud-based data warehouses can occupy a central position among various types of data storage and processing solutions, and are also suitable for handling big data and analytical engines, helping you complete your next project in less time and with more targeted relevance.

Backup and Disaster Recovery
Backup and disaster recovery are essential for data protection and access, but keeping up with increasing capacity demands is an ongoing challenge. Cloud storage offers low-cost, highly persistent data recovery and backup solutions with maximum scalability. Built-in data management policies can automatically migrate data to a lower-cost repository based on time and frequency settings, and archival repositories can be created to help comply with legal or regulatory requirements. These advantages enable massive scale-up across industries such as financial services, healthcare, life sciences, media, and entertainment, which generate large amounts of unstructured data while meeting long-term data retention requirements.

Software Testing and Development
Software development and testing environments often require separate, independent, and redundant storage environments that can be managed on and off. In addition to the time required, the initial capital costs can be significant.
Many of the world's largest and most important companies build applications in record time using flexible, high-performance, and low-cost cloud storage. Even the simplest static websites can be optimized at a low cost. Developers and IT professionals are turning to pay-per-use storage options that solve management and scale issues.

Cloud data migration
The availability, stability, and low cost of cloud storage can be very compelling factors. On the other hand, IT professionals who work with storage, backup, networking, security, and compliance administrators may face concerns about the realities of moving large amounts of data to the cloud. For some, moving data to the cloud can be a challenge. Data migration, edge computing, and hybrid data services are available wherever you are in the world to help you move data to the cloud with ease.

Compliance
Storing sensitive data in the cloud can raise regulatory and compliance concerns, especially if that data is currently stored in compliant storage systems. Cloud data compliance controls are designed to ensure you can deploy and enforce comprehensive compliance controls over your data, helping you meet the compliance requirements of virtually every regulatory agency worldwide. Sometimes using a shared responsibility model, cloud providers enable customers to effectively and efficiently manage risk within their IT environment, providing assurances that risk is effectively managed through compliance with applicable and widely recognized programs and frameworks.

Cloud Native App Store
Cloud-native applications use technologies such as containerized storage and serverless cloud computing to meet customer expectations in a fast and flexible manner. These applications typically consist of small, loosely coupled, independent components called microservices that communicate internally by sharing data or state. Cloud storage services provide data management for these applications and offer solutions to current data warehousing challenges in the cloud environment.

Archives
Organizations are currently facing significant challenges from the exponential growth of data. Machine learning and analytics are providing more uses for data than ever before. Regulatory compliance requires long data retention periods. Customers must replace their on-premises disk and tape archive infrastructure with solutions that offer improved data stability, immediate recovery times, better compliance and security, and greater access to data for advanced analytics and business intelligence.

Hybrid cloud storage
Many organizations seek the benefits of cloud storage, but have applications running on-premises that require low-latency data access, or need to move data quickly to the cloud. Hybrid cloud storage architectures connect on-premises applications and systems to cloud storage to help you reduce costs, reduce administrative burden, and innovate with data.

Data warehouse
Because block stores are highly performant and easily updated, many organizations are keen to use them for transactional databases. With limited metadata, block stores can provide minimal latency for high-performance workloads and latency-sensitive applications, such as databases.
Block stores allow developers to build a robust, scalable, and highly efficient transactional database. Because each block is a self-contained unit, the database performs optimally, even as the volume of stored data increases.