A cloudy forecast for storage?
Agencies weigh the cost savings and risks of emerging “cloud” storage services?
By Alan Joch
Published on July 21, 2008
| The savvy executive |
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Here are some questions executives should ask when deciding whether storage as a service makes sense for their organizations.
- What’s the total cost of using cloud storage, including fees for data at rest and in transit, in addition to any infrastructure upgrades needed for connecting to storage service providers?0
- How does the total cost of ownership for maintaining in-house storage investments compare with the total cost of ownership for cloud storage?
- What data, if any, am I comfortable storing off-site and making available at less than optimum access speeds?
- What are all the applications that might use the data being stored off-site, and what are the ramifications of these application interdependencies when data isn’t stored in-house?
- What’s the uptime record of the service providers I’m considering? How quickly are they able to recover when outages occur?
- What redundancies do vendors have in place to guard against data center, power and cooling, and communications breakdowns?
- How sophisticated is the service provider’s security infrastructure, including its use of access controls, intrusion prevention/detection systems, and physical access monitoring?
- Will my data stay within the boundaries of my country or does the storage cloud stretch to international locations?
- Can the service provider encrypt my data when it’s stored in off-site databases and when it’s being transferred across the network?
- What provisions will there be in our service-level agreement for getting our data back if we change service providers, or if the one we’re using folds?
- What procedures and technologies does the service provider use to guarantee hard drives are wiped clean when we request data to be deleted?
— Alan Joch
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| Control storage costs |
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Service-level agreements for cloud storage should spell out specific performance goals for uptime, data access rates and recovery times. However, to control costs, agencies don’t need the same performance guarantees for all service areas, said Vance Checketts, chief operating officer of Mozy, an online backup service acquired by storage vendor EMC last fall.
“You might not have ‘five nines’ [99.999 percent uptime] for the overall service, but as you peel back the layers, there may be particular components where you really want that higher standard,” he explained.
Although Mozy still provides only backup services, Checketts said a cloud storage service is in the works, possibly as part of a combined offering with software-as-a-service providers.
“For example, if a backup session doesn’t complete immediately, that’s probably not a big deal as long as it [eventually] is successful within the interval of choice specified the contract,” he said. “More significant is the restore process, where if something catastrophic occurs, you’ll need a very high availability.”
— Alan Joch
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As more organizations explore software as a service (SaaS) and other third-party information technology services as alternatives to the traditional build-your-own approach, there is another spin on the model for IT executives to consider: cloud storage, or storage as a service.
A surprising variety of providers, from online retailer Amazon.com and search-engine behemoth Google to more traditional IT companies such as EMC and Nirvanix, offers services designed to reduce the costs and management headaches that come with enterprise storage.
The strategy is starting to take hold in the public sector, though a cautious approach is advisable given concerns about data security, performance and availability.
The District of Columbia uses off-site storage as part of its fledgling cloud computing initiatives around Google Apps, a suite of business software, and Intuit’s QuickBase online development platform.
“I see a compelling economic reason why we would move some of our services to the cloud model, storage included,” said Vivek Kundra, the district’s chief technology officer. “We’re finding it extremely useful because of the velocity with which we can apply solutions to problems, rather than spending millions of dollars and years to craft some magic bullet that may end up failing.”
Different flavors
Cloud storage comes in three primary varieties. In addition to bundling storage and applications in the same physical location, as the District of Columbia’s service providers do, some vendors offer discrete storage options.
Amazon, Google and Nirvanix are rolling out services that let government agencies upload data to the cloud, which means it’s available through a secure Web connection to any authorized staff member. The servers and applications that ultimately use the data can run in an agency’s IT infrastructure or at another vendor’s SaaS facility.
Virginia is using a third option. It contracted with systems integrator Northrop Grumman to create what Aneesh Chopra, Virginia’s secretary of technology, calls a proprietary cloud. Virginia taps into the computing and storage resources available from two data centers that for now are dedicated to the commonwealth. Virginia’s goal with cloud storage is to eliminate low-level IT concerns.
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