Data Analytics and Health Informatics

What is Cloud Storage?

Cloud storage is a cloud computing model that stores data on the Internet through a cloud computing provider that manages and operates data storage as a service. It’s delivered on-demand with just-in-time capacity and costs and eliminates buying and managing your own data storage infrastructure. This gives you agility, global scale, and durability, with “anytime, anywhere” data access. Cloud storage gives users the ability to share and access files remotely without access to their local storage systems.

Advantages of Cloud Storage

1. Cost

Purchasing physical storage can be expensive. Without the need for hardware, cloud storage is exceptionally cheaper per GB than using external drives.

2. Accessibility

Using the cloud for storage gives you access to your files from anywhere that has an internet connection.

3. Recovery

In the event of a hard drive failure or other hardware malfunction, you can access your files on the cloud. It acts as a backup solution for your local storage on physical drives.

4. Syncing and Updating

When you are working with cloud storage, every time you make changes to a file it will be synced and updated across all your devices that you access the cloud from.

5. Security

Cloud storage providers add additional layers of security to their services. Since there are many people with files stored on the cloud, these providers go to added lengths to make sure your files don't get accessed by someone who shouldn't

Disadvantages of Cloud Storage

1. Internet Connection

Cloud-based storage is dependent on having an internet connection. If you are on a slow network you may have issues accessing your storage. In the event you find yourself somewhere without internet, you won't be able to access your files.

2. Costs

There are additional costs for uploading and downloading files from the cloud. These can quickly add up if you are trying to access lots of files often.

3. Hard Drives

Cloud storage is supposed to eliminate our dependency on hard drives, right? Well, some business cloud storage providers require physical hard drives as well.

4. Support

Support for cloud storage isn't the best, especially if you are using a free version of a cloud provider. Many providers refer you to a knowledge base or FAQs.

5. Privacy

When you use a cloud provider, your data is no longer on your physical store. So, who is responsible for making sure that data is secure? That's a gray area that is still being figured out.

Cloud Storage Requirements

1.  Durability

Data should be redundantly stored, ideally across multiple facilities and multiple devices in each facility. Natural disasters, human error, or mechanical faults should not result in data loss.

2. Availability

 All data should be available when needed, but there is a difference between production data and archives. The ideal cloud storage will deliver the right balance of retrieval times and cost.

3. Security

All data is ideally encrypted, both at rest and in transit. Permissions and access controls should work just as well in the cloud as they do for on-premises storage.

Types of Cloud Storage

1.  Object Storage 

Applications developed in the cloud often take advantage of object storage's vast scalability and metadata characteristics. Object storage solutions like Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) are ideal for building modern applications from scratch that require scale and flexibility and can also be used to import existing data stores for analytics, backup, or archive.

2. File Storage 

Some applications need to access shared files and require a file system. This type of storage is often supported with a Network Attached Storage (NAS) server. File storage solutions like Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) are ideal for use cases like large content repositories, development environments, media stores, or user home directories.

3.  Block Storage 

Other enterprise applications like databases or ERP systems often require dedicated, low latency storage for each host. This is analogous to direct-attached storage (DAS) or a Storage Area Network (SAN). Block-based cloud storage solutions like Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) are provisioned with each virtual server and offer the ultra-low latency required for high-performance workloads.

In Conclusion, choosing one cloud service from the other is not easy. The best cloud storage services offer a lifeline to creatives, more so than ever. It's not just that these services allow you to work from anywhere, requiring only an internet connection to access all your files. It's also that they take away the need for physical storage space, and as resolutions get higher and files to get bigger, that is only going to become more important. In our next post we will compare the cost and application of the commonest provider of cloud services in low income and small business settings.