The public cloud is often equated with efficiency, savings and agility. And it’s growing fast. According to Statista, global spending on public cloud computing has nearly tripled in the past five years, from $243 billion in 2019 to a projected $678 billion in 2024.
At first glance, it may seem logical that it is cheaper to transfer the responsibility for owning and managing storage, compute, and networking resources to a public cloud provider. However, this is not always the case.
While migrating to the cloud can be an ideal and cost-effective option for many organizations, it is not the perfect solution we are led to believe. High outbound costs can pose an unforeseen challenge, undermining the initially expected cost benefits of moving to the cloud. And security, data sovereignty and performance are some of the factors to consider before taking the plunge.
1. Scalability
The ability to easily grow or shrink a system, and scale up and down on demand, is often touted as one of the key benefits of the cloud. But how often should organizations downsize their storage system?
Data is growing at a rapid pace, and in the vast majority of cases, organizations will need to continually increase their storage capacity as they generate and collect more and more data, expand their operations, and introduce new programs or workloads. When developing a list of requirements, one must ask whether the ability to both reduce and enlarge is really necessary.
2. Costs
Variable public cloud costs can pose critical challenges to IT teams’ budgets. While it’s easy to plan fixed monthly costs, variable costs are harder to predict. For example, egress costs may increase or decrease depending on the number of applications or end-user requests for data stored in the cloud. When creating your budget, make sure you take these variable costs into account in addition to the fixed price.
Comparing the total cost of ownership of an on-premises system with its cloud-based counterpart is worthwhile and can yield significant savings. An analysis conducted for an agency comparing the costs of a cloud-based and on-premises backup solution found that the cloud was significantly more expensive, even with upfront costs factored in.
This cost difference would have been even greater because the public cloud’s network bandwidth would have had to be improved to meet the company’s Recovery Time Objective (RTO) requirement. In this scenario, on-premise was considered the optimal solution, with constant costs and superior performance.
3. Security
With cyber attacks on the rise, security and data protection are critical for all organizations. Whether in the cloud or on premises, companies should do that? Make sure you prioritize immutability and a zero-trust approach when analyzing the most suitable storage location for their workloads.
Immutability is increasingly emerging as a critical element in organizations’ security arsenal, as it ensures that when data is written, it is then ‘untouchable’ and immune to deletion or modification. This is especially important for cloud backups, which are becoming an increasingly popular target for ransomware attackers; without their backups, organizations cannot recover their data and are more likely to pay a ransom.
When it comes to immutability, not all forms provide the same level of protection, with some allowing a certain period of exposure. Native object storage solutions differ from other forms of immutable storage at the architectural layer, meaning they keep data in its original form at the time it is written and never overwrite existing data.
Snapshots can help as part of a comprehensive ransomware strategy. However, traditional snapshots are less feasible with today’s scale and capacity of data, with huge numbers of files and the need for high frequency of snapshots.
Fortunately, that is starting to change with new technology. For example, our proprietary snapshot technology enables data management even with billions of files and multi-petabyte data requirements.
But returning to the issue of costs and outgoings when considering security: if you store data in the public cloud, how much are you willing to pay to recover their data in the event of a ransomware attack?
4. Classifications
In both cloud and on-premise systems, proper data classification is critical. IT teams must prevent data leakage and ensure that data is not accidentally written to a lower classification system than it should be. This is not always an easy task, especially in the public cloud where different clouds are offered to support different classifications.
Additionally, teams must ensure that anyone supporting a public cloud has the necessary permissions, especially considering potential data breaches. These challenges can also arise in on-site setups, but organizations typically have already refined their methodologies and can rely on personnel with the required authority.
5. File vs. block vs. object
The vast majority of data stored on expensive block and file systems remains untouched. It is estimated that 80% have not been visited in the last 90 days, and this percentage increases over longer periods. To reduce the size of these costly systems and improve backup times, it is worth considering deploying cheaper solutions such as a scalable object store.
6. Performance
Typically, it takes longer to write to the cloud than to on-premises systems. For example, in an organization that has only one or two gateways to the Internet, the data would first need to be sent over the WAN to a gateway, which could be located in a different office, and from there to the cloud. Take the time to assess current and future performance needs before deciding between a cloud or on-premises system.
7. Data sovereignty
It’s critical to clearly understand where an organization’s data is stored, even if it’s in the cloud. IT teams need to be able to track the location of their data to comply with local data location regulations. This should be carefully considered before deciding whether or not to move workloads to the cloud, or which cloud provider to select.
As you are no doubt aware, the EU has taken the lead in legislating in this area. However, it is difficult to balance that legislation with business growth. Practical measures such as encouraging interoperability standards, private cloud adoption, support for the Buy European Act and financing cloud infrastructure scale-ups will help in this ongoing cloud transition.
With numerous factors involved, the decision to move workloads to the cloud or keep them on-premises is not an easy one. To help you navigate these complexities, consider the points discussed above. Taking these factors into account can help you make the best decision for both users and budgets, and avoid unwanted surprises down the line.
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