IT consulting experts are in all types of business because the best way for a company to grow is with its technology supporting them. The cloud has helped businesses expand and make more money but CIO.com talks about in a seven page article about how to make sure your use the cloud help your IT support team. Check it out.
Whether they’re in manufacturing, finance, healthcare or education, IT professionals are as concerned as ever about data security and privacy, with regulatory compliance weighing heavily on their minds, so they fret about sending data offsite. Likewise, they wonder if performance will be adversely affected if there’s a long distance between an application and its storage site.
For reasons such as those, “we’re really not seeing much willingness to put enterprise data in the cloud yet,” says Gartner analyst Adam Couture, who covers storage services.
That isn’t to say that enterprises are shying away from cloud storage entirely. Many companies in vertical markets of every ilk have found the cloud to be a perfect fit for their backup, archival and file data. In other words, the cloud makes sense when speed of retrieval isn’t an issue.
And Couture says the perception of the cloud’s suitability as a storage medium for mission-critical data and applications will change over the years, as enterprises grow to accept public cloud computing in general.
“If you’re running Amazon EC2 [the company’s cloud computing service] and S3, and the storage is the same physical location as the server, latency becomes a nonissue, and you won’t be charged every time you move the data, because it’s local,” he says.
Storage that’s simple
In fact, you can already find notable organizations using cloud storage in a variety of industries. Turning to the cloud is a logical move when you’re involved in distributing a lot of data to a Web site, perhaps with the help of a content delivery network. Indeed, prime examples of cloud storage users are companies in media, retail and other verticals that are accustomed to finagling content delivery over the Web.
“When we think about who’s using the public cloud for storage, it’s really those like media companies that have need for fluctuating storage, and a lot of it. They go to the cloud, plop stuff in extra storage that they need for a certain period of time — it’s a fluid resource for them,” says Ruthbea Yesner Clarke, an analyst at IDC.
Check out CIO.com, for the whole article. Trusting your tech support team with the cloud can be a hard step but it should be done.
