Does Cloud Computing mean the End of Traditional Storage Networks?
Technically Yes! With cloud’s scalability options attracting SMBs and large businesses towards it and cloud becoming secure with each passing day; we are near to say goodbye to the traditional ways we used to store our data over the network. Though networking is quite difficult to understand especially when one has expertise in building business, let’s check out how things were traditionally and how the cloud is slowing replacing it.
What comprised a traditional storage network?
Storage network or storage networking as the word says is the high speed networking of shared storage devices. This storage network connects to data servers so the data is accessible from anywhere across the network. As your requirements grow, you can connect hundreds of server machines to hundreds or even thousands of storage devices locally (LAN) or over the WAN (Wide Area Network).
How cloud storage works:
As for the cloud storage, you upload your data via a secure internet connection on a 3rd party data center. This 3rd party which is the cloud provider maintains your data and allows you to retrieve it any time by connecting to the server. While these servers require maintenance or repair occasionally or might even fail in an extreme case, the cloud provider stores your files on multiple servers, which is called redundancy so you can access them anytime.
Why companies love to join the cloud?
The reason is simple. The cloud allows you to access your data from anywhere around the world using the internet. Also not just your own enterprise can access but you can easily share with who you want and even work in collaboration with anyone around the world connected through internet. And the best thing is companies especially that of small and medium size now don’t have to worry about developing an in-house IT structure. No worry about buying servers and storage and deploying them making sure that it can cater the business needs nor have to pay for specialized IT experts who look after your network. They can launch their cloud from anywhere within minutes and transfer all their data there while its security is taken care by the vendor.
Where will it go further:
At least we know that this isn’t the end to the tussle between the traditional computing and the cloud. With the internet connection getting better and better and the coming of SSDs in cloud storage it is thought that the cloud will completely make the traditional storage obsolete.
