How does hybrid cloud storage computing work?
Hybrid cloud, in many ways, is like a strange beast with multiple personalities! It can act as local storage, it can act as a remote file server, it can be an FTP server, you can access it via tablet, smart phone or desktop and it keeps track of the work of a team including you, your colleagues, partners and customers!
In a nutshell, a hybrid cloud storage solution, the cloud (#1 in the figure), acts as an intermediary that maintains a super set of your data, with the local cloud acting as the primary storage.
In many ways the hybrid cloud is the answer to Paul Samuelso's dilemma "have one's cake and eat it too...;"
If your local NAS box (or the laptop hard disk) crashes, the remote cloud acts as backup; and the local cloud acts as backup if your cloud service goes down.
What is a hybrid cloud storage? What is local cloud and how can I use it?
Hybrid cloud storage is an approach to managing storage that uses both local and off-site resources. Hybrid cloud storage solution is the most practical way to address the business need to maintain some resources in-house and others online (in the cloud).
The cloud portion of a hybrid storage cloud provides the ability for secure and controlled access to data anywhere (inside and outside an organization) with any device, using Internet access.
The hybrid portion of a hybrid cloud storage solution refers to the local storage, also called local cloud. This local storage can be a network-attached storage (NAS) device or virtual appliance, and provides data access at LAN speeds that is not dependent on the Internet.
The cloud acts as an intermediary that maintains a superset of the data, with the local cloud acting as the primary storage.
Why is cloud storage computing efficient?
Why choose hybrid cloud storage?
The main advantage of hybrid cloud storage is device agnostic access to files from anywhere, still maintaining fast, uninterrupted local access within the office, and achieving security and access control. From an IT organization perspective, aligning with a hybrid cloud storage enables them to provide services to end users instead of managing an infrastructure.
Here is an interesting article appeared in San Jose Mercury News
http://www.insidebayarea.com/business/ci_19932252. Their conclusions are very relevant:
A perfect recipe for hybrid cloud storages, indeed!
How does cloud storage help BYOD?
BYOD is a recent trend — it means Bring Your Own Device; employees are free to bring their own devices and use them for work, instead of the company providing a set of fixed devices. This poses challenges for the IT folks, as the devices cannot be secured via uniform security policies.
The hybrid cloud storage provides the best approach in this scenario. The IT folks can implement folder permissions, utilize audit reports and so forth using the storage cloud, while employees can access the data from anywhere with any device.
How will hybrid cloud make enterprises more agile?
Business agility is the ability to distribute, share, access and act on information as quickly as possible.
As a result, the ability to access and work on digital content from multiple devices in a distributed mobile fashion becomes imperative, and that is achieved by using hybrid cloud storage.
Let us quickly look at a few organizations and interesting use cases:
In short, multi-office organizations, teams that collaborate with partners and customers, engineering and construction companies, creative agencies, and schools are all examples of organizations achieving agility using a hybrid storage cloud.
Other question(s) answered in this page include: