Cloud Storage Poised to Save Enterprises Money: Report

Public cloud storage services are fast becoming a more attractive option for the enterprise, according to a new report by research firm Ovum.

In its “Clouds Open for Enterprise Storage” report, Ovum said that a new generation of services is emerging in public clouds that can handle live data generated by applications running on customers’ premises. These storage services are designed to be used separately from other cloud services and are attractively priced compared to traditional, on-premises storage systems.

“Not only do they relieve the burden of storing data on customers’ premises, but they also have the multiplying effect of transferring to the cloud provider the responsibility of backing up that data,” Ovum senior analyst Timothy Stammers said in a statement.

Vendors have been pitching online storage services to IT for over a decade, but they never reached their potential or won significant adoption.”Considerable investments were made in these companies, and industry observers predicted that they would thrive. But the opposite happened, and the [online storage service provider] movement collapsed within a few years,” Ovum said in its report.

Cost was a big factor in that failure. Because the online storage service providers were using the same enterprise storage systems as their customers, their services weren’t significantly cheaper than what customers were paying for their own in-house storage. Stammers also noted that these providers faced hefty network bandwidth costs and resistance from customers still unfamiliar with the emerging concept of public cloud services.

But a lot has changed over the past several years. The price of network bandwidth has plummeted and, with IT budgets under considerable pressure in a shaky economy, CIOs are looking for ways to effectively cut costs. Also, far from being a foreign concept, cloud computing has become far more established with the success of Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN), Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) and other well-known providers.

Ovum also said service providers are starting to use a new generation of object-oriented storage technology, which stores very large volumes of data at far lower cost than conventional enterprise storage systems.

In an interview with InternetNews.com, Stammers pointed to several startups that already offer these new cloud services, including Nirvanix, Nasumi and Ctera. “Nirvanix is the oldest with about 700 customers in three years, which is pretty impressive,” Stammers said.

He also noted that many of these new cloud storage providers aren’t even operating the storage systems themselves. Instead, they leverage giant storage clouds run by Amazon, Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) or RackSpace (NYSE: RAX) to get further economy of scale.

These companies offer enterprise customers a gateway system that translates traditional file structures to the object-oriented storage.

“To the customer it still looks like ordinary storage and there’s caching to alleviate latency issues,” Stammers said. “Typically these systems also provide their own backup, but companies may also choose to do that on their own for an extra level of protection.”

David Needle is the West Coast bureau chief at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.

RELATED NEWS AND ANALYSIS

• Ethics and Artificial Intelligence: Driving Greater Equality

  FEATURE |  By James Maguire,
  December 16, 2020

• AI vs. Machine Learning vs. Deep Learning

  FEATURE |  By Cynthia Harvey,
  December 11, 2020

• Huawei’s AI Update: Things Are Moving Faster Than We Think

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  December 04, 2020

• Keeping Machine Learning Algorithms Honest in the ‘Ethics-First’ Era

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Guest Author,
  November 18, 2020

• Key Trends in Chatbots and RPA

  FEATURE |  By Guest Author,
  November 10, 2020

• Top 10 AIOps Companies

  FEATURE |  By Samuel Greengard,
  November 05, 2020

• What is Text Analysis?

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Guest Author,
  November 02, 2020

• How Intel’s Work With Autonomous Cars Could Redefine General Purpose AI

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  October 29, 2020

• Dell Technologies World: Weaving Together Human And Machine Interaction For AI And Robotics

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  October 23, 2020

• The Super Moderator, or How IBM Project Debater Could Save Social Media

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  October 16, 2020

• Top 10 Chatbot Platforms

  FEATURE |  By Cynthia Harvey,
  October 07, 2020

• Finding a Career Path in AI

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Guest Author,
  October 05, 2020

• CIOs Discuss the Promise of AI and Data Science

  FEATURE |  By Guest Author,
  September 25, 2020

• Microsoft Is Building An AI Product That Could Predict The Future

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 25, 2020

• Top 10 Machine Learning Companies 2021

  FEATURE |  By Cynthia Harvey,
  September 22, 2020

• NVIDIA and ARM: Massively Changing The AI Landscape

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 18, 2020

• Continuous Intelligence: Expert Discussion [Video and Podcast]

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By James Maguire,
  September 14, 2020

• Artificial Intelligence: Governance and Ethics [Video]

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE |  By James Maguire,
  September 13, 2020

• IBM Watson At The US Open: Showcasing The Power Of A Mature Enterprise-Class AI

  FEATURE |  By Rob Enderle,
  September 11, 2020

• Artificial Intelligence: Perception vs. Reality

  FEATURE |  By James Maguire,
  September 09, 2020