Any entrepreneur that hasn’t lived under a rock over the past five years has heard of cloud computing. Whether the business is a small company or mid-size corporate environment, the benefits of virtualized storage have only become more attractive over time as the technology has gotten more reliable.
Businesses may regard physical storage as bulky and incurring an upfront capital investment. Without backups in place, hard drive failure presents a malignant problem. Not to mention, it’s alluring for companies to offload security and storage management to a third-party company.
However, just because cloud computing seems like the perfect solution, doesn’t mean that it’s a panacea for data storage.
Why are Companies Concerned over Cloud Storage?
Implementing proper data storage is one of the most vital tasks for any modern company. Though distributed data storage is attractive, there are several important concerns to think about before ever trusting an unaffiliated storage company.
Data Security
Outsourcing data storage presents a major challenge to any type of business. According to the enterprise security firm Proofpoint, over 60 percent of fortune 500 companies have been penetrated by hackers. Online, it only takes an average of one comprised account to give malicious actors access to a virtualized storage system’s entire database.
It’s a problem of basic probability: distributed data is stored in more physical locations across geographic space, resulting in an increased risk of unauthorized access to data. In-house storage only gives a tiny subset of network administrators authorization to view stored data, while distributed systems give potentially thousands of customers and employees broad authorization.
Performance
Local storage is almost always faster than outsourced systems. Distributed systems are necessarily slower because information must be transferred across often vast geographic distances.
Local storage is almost always faster than outsourced systems. Distributed systems are necessarily slower because information must be transferred across often vast geographic distances. Moreover, distributed storage companies typically charge more for a relatively smaller amount of WAN bandwidth, resulting in higher costs over time with less capacity than in-house systems.
At the end of the day, the reliability of the storage depends both on the storage company’s server up-time and the business’ network availability. With virtualized storage, certain precautions will need to be taken by any responsible company to ensure constant access to important data.
Longevity
Virtualized storage companies are, in no way, permanent fixtures. Mergers, acquisitions, and bankruptcy pose just as high a risk as distributed storage environments in other businesses. When servers change hands, company goals change and the focus may shift away from data security to access optimization. Under large moves, certain business data exportation across continents may cause data corruption.
Ultimately, a business will need to conduct careful research into storage companies that prize security, longevity, and access in addition to withstanding corporate changes.
Reliable Local Storage Solutions to Cloud-Based Problems
Even after all these years, many companies continue to opt for local in-house storage. Though larger serves require a dedicated team of network administrators, the dividends are paid back in data security, longevity, and access speed.
Additionally, many have chosen to house the bulk of their data on-site with ultra-compressed stores of virtualized data backed up online. The benefit of this dual approach is that an encrypted copy of the information may be restored in the event of a natural disaster, fire, or major system failure.
Currently, one of the most preferred solutions is to use a hardware encrypted hard drive. Through employing sophisticated mathematical functions to seamlessly convert data, all the information stored locally will become completely inaccessible by an unauthorized entity.
Consider opting for our award-winning, robustly secure, and hardware-encrypted SecureDrives. All of our products are completely GDPR compliant and are FIPS 140-2 Level 3 Validated, meaning that we adhere to government standards of data security.
The device and subsequently the data on it can only be accessed by entering a unique PIN via the KP model, or through a secure mobile app paired with the BT model. The SecureDrives are OS independent to work across all systems with a USB port so they can easily be implemented into any existing work station. Control is also easy to establish with both user and admin modes for the drives.
.png){kind=small}
