In the last 10 years, cloud technology has grown from a simple means of storing and retrieving data to a means of running and managing your business and collaborating with suppliers, customers and other partners. If we examine the emerging trends in cloud technology, we see more people using this technology in more ways than ever before.
Cloud Storage
The biggest emerging trend in cloud technology is, unsurprisingly, exponential growth of cloud servers. The more businesses and corporations that use cloud technology, the greater the need for more cloud servers and services on the net. Traditional storage can be quite expensive compared to off-site storage on the cloud, but many companies were, in the early days, not ready to jump on this alternative method of storage because of issues with security, ownership and recoverability. These issues are being addressed today with emerging technologies, which means more companies and corporations are considering cloud technology for their storage than ever before.
Cloud Backup and Retrieval
Another emerging trend in cloud technology is the area of backup and retrieval. Previously, having a good backup system in place meant separate backup servers which automatically backed up data at set intervals, writing this data to hard media (such as disk drives, tape drives, etc.). Often businesses used redundant backups for backing up their information, which required even more hardware often costing them hundreds of thousands of dollars. When you factor in the media used to store the backups (depending on how long you want to store your backups) you can see that this practice was quite costly.
Today, more vendors are offering complete backup solutions on the cloud, saving companies hundreds of thousands in hardware, maintenance and other costs. A wide variety of cloud backup solutions are emerging on the internet, from simple redundant file backup to full server image backups. Many vendors today are offering complete disaster recovery solutions for a fraction of the cost of traditional disaster recovery. What this means is that even if a business is hacked and all files, programs, databases, etc. are lost, with today’s emerging cloud technology in disaster recovery, businesses are able to recover most (if not all) of the data lost, quickly and easily.
Direct Backup
In the past, with cloud technology, most businesses would have to store their backups in-house, then transfer their backups to the cloud. This was because of, for the most part, the limited bandwidth available. Today as bandwidth is increasing exponentially the practice of using back-up appliances is quickly becoming redundant. Businesses can now backup their data directly to the cloud without worrying about loss of data with speeds approaching those of LAN networks. There is really no reason to spend thousands of dollars on backup appliances to store data for offloading to the cloud when you can simply backup directly to the cloud in about the same time it would take to store it to a backup appliance and then backup from the appliance to the cloud.
As emerging cloud technologies allow for faster, more secure storage and backup, more businesses are finding that off-premise storage is a good solution to reduce the overhead costs of doing their day to day business. As bandwidth increases, businesses are finding many other solutions on the cloud that were previously only viable with in-house storage.
The potential of emerging cloud technology is virtually limitless so that almost anything you can now do with your in-house server you will be able to accomplish on the cloud both more cheaply and more securely.
