5 Tips for Enterprises Considering a Private Storage Cloud
December 22, 2010
Grazed from Cloud Storage Strategy. Author: Steve Lesem.
Enterprises are increasingly looking to on-premise private storage clouds as a cost-effective way to share information. Why? A cloud behind the firewall enables users to easily access, share and collaborate without compromising data security, integrity and availability. But there are still a few points every enterprise needs to consider before making the decision…
- Consider your security needs. How private is a private cloud? How confidential is the data that you may ultimately store in the cloud? Do you want the cloud behind your firewall, and if so, how will you access it? Will you open a port and depend on a user id and password for access control, or will you also require that your cloud is accessed via a VPN? Remember, today an employee can decide to email a confidential file to someone outside of the firewall, so what do you really accomplish with a "private cloud"? If the cloud is available thru a port, can you monitor the cloud and shut it down when (not if) it comes under attack? If the data being stored cannot be compromised then it cannot be on a network, at all.
- Make sure you have adequate internal resources. Do you have the scale, expertise and data center space to host your own private storage cloud and will you save money versus public, multi tenant storage clouds? Assuming that your analysis of number (1) above suggests that a private cloud is a desirable approach, then our experience is that you can host your own cloud for an identified operational cost that is at least as low as the public provider. Now, if it forces you to accelerate capital consumption in order to build out a data center, it may be a poor decision. But all those sorts of things being equal, you can do it. The intangible costs, like unanticipated headaches, dilution of focus on your scarce resources, and or a poor choice of cloud infrastructure can quickly turn a winner into a loser.
- Identify a use case before starting. A common mistake that we see is the extraordinary focus on the technology as opposed to a focus on your cloud storage use case and the business case that surrounds the use case. The project should start with an analysis of the use case and its resulting impact on the business, and operate on the assumption you can source a cloud of appropriate size, scalability and costs.
- Research technology solutions that are most appropriate for your use case. When you take the use case approach, you will quickly understand that a private cloud is not just a storage infrastructure; but rather an ecosystem of cloud storage clients, backup and archive solutions, special purpose data movers, management and support, that, when combined with a cloud storage infrastructure gives you a complete solution. Once again, a use case focus will flush this out, versus a platform technology led process.
- Integrate cloud storage with your overall cloud computing strategy. A storage cloud is simply one layer of a cloud computing stack. How does this cloud fit within your cloud computing stack? Does the way in which you integrate it support the other cloud computing decisions you have made? Evaluation of the cloud storage solution and how it will interact with, support and/or be the infrastructure associated with your overall computing cloud is a critical part of your overall evaluation. You may also choose to use a service provider hosted "private cloud" to solve issues associated with your deployment, and not ever deploy the storage part of a compute cloud within your own data center.