Cloud Storage Services

For many organizations, unstructured data — audio, video, digital images, social media and so forth — continues to grow unabated. At the same time, IT departments are facing budget and resource constraints, limiting the ability of storage administrators to effectively manage data growth.

As data needs grow, organizations will increasingly look to the cloud for cost-effective ways to store, manage, and leverage the data they need to run their businesses. Pressures created by four fundamental IT trends — cloud, mobility, social business, and Big Data — are expected to place additional (and near unprecedented) demand for storage supporting unstructured data. The continued expansion of business-critical information, diverse data sets, distributed data sources, and rich content within extended enterprises continues to change the storage dynamic in a wide range of industries and organizations. Organizing this expanding universe of file- and object-based information in as efficient a manner as possible and at the same time extracting value from it are becoming core business mandates.

Complex storage environments make it difficult to identify and access data, which in turn potentially make it difficult to leverage it for analytics or to create business intelligence. Moving to the cloud can introduce availability and security risks, particularly for those organizations that have regulatory requirements. In this kind of environment, organizations need to leverage existing storage infrastructures and services to turn business critical data into valuable intelligence.

The solutions organizations choose will need to incorporate both object-based storage and strong metadata capabilities that support multi-tenancy and the ability to find and access the data that users need regardless of where that data resides.  Ultimately, customers also want the ability to choose the cloud delivery model or models that best suit their access, security, scalability, and compliance needs.

Private, public, and hybrid cloud models can enable organizations to choose the right option for all their data and content, while allowing them to manage, find, and access the data they need when they need it to support the business.  As content, data, and analytics needs grow, various cloud services enable organizations to scale their solutions and to more effectively transform their data into intelligence.