Digital businesses are facing an uphill challenge with how to best manage their data. Not only is the volume of data growing exponentially, fuelled by digital media, big data, Internet of Things and artificial intelligence, increasing amounts of data are becoming more valuable and are frequently critical to business operations. The smartest businesses will be those that take action now to organise their data into a modern storage strategy to avoid data chaos ensuing in the future.
For many businesses, continuing to rely on traditional on-site storage hardware, including physical servers and external drives, is no longer viable to support the demand for storage capacity, provide a fully agile IT infrastructure or enable seamless collaboration between remote working locations.
As a result, organisations of all sizes are increasingly tapping into cloud storage. This delivers highly scalable, flexible and cost-effective ways to categorise and store data according to value and access needs. Notably, cloud storage facilitates access to data from almost anywhere at any time and does not rely on on-premise hardware.
In addition, data heavy businesses are increasingly facing another issue – that of data gravity, where workloads and applications are pulled towards massive volumes of data. As data volumes grow, it is more problematic to pull different sets of data apart and organise this efficiently into the cloud. All the more reason for organisations to explore hybrid options where they can use a variety of storage types across a number ofcloud providers.
Analyse data use
There are many cloud storage options readily available to today’s digital businesses, which have their own benefits and drawbacks with performance, scalability and cost. The primary ones are object, file and block storage. It is essential to remember that not all data is equal, and every business needs to weigh up its options to align with its specific business requirements.
To allocate data storage optimally needs upfront investment to audit and analyse every use case. This could include archiving, file sharing, collaboration, backups, big data analytics and application development. No matter how data is used, it pays off to understand its lifecycle. Looking at the type of data, how often it is accessed and from where, the technical environment it is used in, and any cost constraints will help inform decisions in allocating data sets to the right storage.
Although this is time consuming, this process is likely to facilitate more operational efficiencies. Notably, it also reduces the risk that an organisation’s data will be allowed to amass in one place with one single provider. An audit encourages organisations to restructure their storage infrastructure, typically blending a number of providers into a hybrid model.
Object, file or block?
Object storage is a popular and practical choice for many businesses, as it offers almost limitless flexibility and scalability. It can easily accommodate the swathes of unstructured data characteristic of modern workloads, and businesses can scale storage capacity up and down in real-time all at minimal cost and effort.
It is no wonder that object storage is suited to multimedia content, content delivery, web hosting, backups and DevOps. Data retrieval using customisable search is also straightforward, as identifiers are assigned to each ‘object’ based on metadata and do not need a file system or to fit within a certain block size.
However, object storage does not always provide the most suitable storage for every set of data and how it is used; for example, it tends to be less efficient for small, random read and write files.
File storage uses folders and files to store data in a structure similar to a traditional operating system. This option is a good choice for file sharing and collaboration from different locations, making it well suited to businesses that have either a remote working set up or employees based across several offices. As files are stored in the cloud, backup and recovery of data is straightforward if one device fails.
Similarly, block storage works with a file system but is designed for performance. It breaks data into fixed size packages, each with a unique identifier, enabling direct access at high speed and low latency. This makes it well suited to critical workloads that users need access to on a very frequent basis, like database systems and other transactional workloads that make up enterprise applications. It is far less suited to unstructured data that requires the use of metadata to search or retrieve information from massive data resources.
As with object storage, file and block storage have down sides. For example, file storage does not offer the scalability of object and block storage. Block storage is typically more costly as it is more complicated to manage.
Choice is key so avoid vendor lock in
In summary, organising cloud storage is a balancing exercise to achieve the right mix of performance with cost. For the majority of businesses, allocating data to only one type of storage is a recipe for service bottlenecks, increased risk or unnecessary spending. Businesses typically choose a combination of storage options that work in a tier arrangement fully aligned with the IT architecture.
As an example, in the media sector, a business might opt for block storage to support the high performance required for video production, while file storage might be used for team document sharing. In this case, object storage would be a prudent and cost-effective option for archiving media files for the long term.
It is fundamental that any business rehauling its data storage strategy also avoids being tied to a single provider. Today’s digital businesses need the flexibility to make changes to their operations as often as they need, without barriers to migration or vendor lock-in. A well-designed cloud storage strategy will go a long way towards minimising this risk and ensuring a business is prepared to meet future data demands head on.
Terry Storrar
Terry Storrar is Managing Director of Leaseweb UK. With over 25 years of experience in the technology sector, Terry is a proven leader, business founder, and turnaround specialist who drives growth and innovation at Leaseweb, a global provider of cloud hosting solutions. Terry leads the UK operations and oversees the strategic direction, customer engagement, and team development of the organisation.
