A Beginner’s Guide to Understanding Cloud Storage

Cloud storage symbolises the evolution of the Internet. With cloud computing, you can now safeguard your data, share it with users and clients, secure it, and work with it productively without having to be worried about physical storage units. 

Whether you are a business or an individual, you are indebted in one way or the other with cloud data. Thanks to cloud service providers, it became even easier for anyone to manage data in the cloud platforms at minimal costs. 

If this sounds interesting to you, then you may want to stick to this blog and learn how cloud storage is a popular and, in a few ways, an unavoidable solution to your organisational work.  

What is Cloud Storage? 

Understanding cloud storage is not rocket science; rather, it is interesting to know. 

You store information or data in the cloud servers when you think about cloud storage. There are companies that provide cloud servers where you can store information in the cloud and access it online (by public or private Internet connections) whenever the need arises. You may also share this data or give access to it to authenticated users without having to reach the users in person or sending physical storage units. 

The cloud service providers go many steps further than just allowing you to store large amounts of data in the servers. They take care of your data, make sure it’s safe, manage hosting services, and establish scalability. It also looks into the part where you have no problem working with this data or running certain data-dependent operations. 

You should know around 96% of companies are into using at least one public cloud. 

How Does Cloud Storage Work? 

To understand how cloud services companies work, you need to think of the term ‘outsourcing’. Consider a call centre. It helps you manage your customer service department without having to make or invest in a separate customer services unit. 

Companies that offer cloud services and storage work in the same way. They provide you with servers and hosting services, which you outsource in a manner to save yourself from the costs of making high-utility servers and storage units or data centres internally. 

It helps you with seamless data storage, faster business or organisational processes, and additional security and scalability factors for your data. Moreover, you can reduce your data footprint too. 

For the financial part, it’s flexible to work with cloud storage platforms because you can pay as you go and open up channels for saving money.

To find out the cloud storage options in a more  detailed way, you might need to look at different types of cloud storage options (which are mainly data architectures) and how they function to help you with your data needs:

Object Storage: This data architecture deals effectively with managing huge amounts of unstructured data. In this architecture, the objects are stored in individual buckets, which remarkably improves their scalability. The objects are stored in the format they come in, which, therefore, helps the metadata to be customised effectively. 

File Storage: As its name suggests, it does work in hierarchical systems. Fils storage works in the folder hierarchical system where data is stored in selected folders where you can find the files, pretty much like you do when you manage data on your personal computer. It is known as Network Attached Storage (NAS) Server too. 

Block Storage: When you store data in blocks, you can store and retrieve data fast. What does that give you? It gives you the low-latency factor where you fetch and store data in considerably less time. Many companies might need to block storage with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. 

Benefits of Using Cloud Storage 

Having known this, you might be wondering why it’s important to use cloud storage for your company rather than any other alternative. 

We might need to look at a few statistics you find below:

Around 60% of the world’s corporate data is stored in the cloud. Think of businesses, nearly 50% of them choose cloud computing technologies and data solutions to store confidential and other crucial data. Consider people and you’ll find a whopping 65% of them choose cloud servers as the first option to store and access personal data. 

There are tons of benefits of using cloud servers, which we need to learn more about to define where cloud storage can help us store data and manage organisational workforces. 

Do you really need to join forces with the cloud storage servers? Well, we can answer this question in this way:

Of course, you get additional storage options by paying for a remote server. You can manage your data, store it, secure it, scale it, and get hosting services without having to build servers on your own. However, what we may not notice with cloud servers is that we get modern data solutions, backup and consultancy with cloud storage services. 

Apart from that, you can use your data faster with cloud storage, manage to store it in online servers to add more protection to data and its privacy, run better analytics, organise unstructured data, stick to current data compliance, and gain a flexible platform to ensure scalable and cost-effective data management. 

Choosing a Cloud Service Provider  

To choose the best one in the cloud service providers, you must come down to the middle ground regarding how reputed the company is in providing cloud solutions and what standard of work and data privacy you can gain from it at cost-effective rates. 

The first step for you to check over here is how long the cloud storage provider has worked in the industry. If you choose a provider that offers data solutions with cloud storage, then it may work out as a bonus. 

Also, check if the company has worked with various companies managing big data. This is because big data management in cloud servers is a typical requirement of modern-day data management provided the high volumes of data are generated almost everywhere. 

Now comes a very important part you need to understand. There is something called the Service Level Agreement or SLA, which defines how the cloud service provider can help you manage data in organisational standards and qualities. This includes response times, data analytics, reporting, and penalties if workflow gets interrupted.

Added to that, pay extra attention to learning the company’s data security standards, norms, and data compliance regulations. 

Setting Up Your Cloud Storage Account 

It’s a step-by-step process, which must be done by organisations very carefully. The good news is you can find effective assistance to create your account safely with many cloud server providers. 

This is the process we want to conduct for safe cloud storage account creation:

• Choose a cloud service provider with a good reputation and trustworthy records
• Log in to your account on the website of the cloud service provider
• Find the ‘Cloud Data Management Console’ and select a bucket (this is where you store your business’s data)
• Set the storage ‘class’ and then choose a region. 
• You can now upload your data after configuring access permissions. 

Please make sure you have understood the terms and conditions of the cloud service provider and checked all the data security measures and services before using the console and uploading your data. If confused, never hesitate to talk to the service provider in advance. 

Managing Your Data in the Cloud  

Generally, there are two parts of the data management in cloud servers if you want a simplified way to understand it. 

The first is data security practices, where setting the right permissions for access management, backup, and encryption. 

The second factor is to improve precision and correctness in data management. For this, you must ask your cloud service provider about monitoring, auditing, and data governance practices you can run for data management.  

Common Challenges and Solutions  

We need to realise the fact that cloud storage is mainly used online and therefore it is a solution that’s heavily dependent on servers and networks. 

Therefore, with a cloud-based storage solution, you might expect encryption and data privacy as one of its top challenges. Data privacy is one of the definitive points of data itself and an online data solution managed by cloud might be exposed to certain risks. 

This very factor brings us to the point where data compliance issues can come into play. 

Apart from these common challenges, vendor lock-ins, cost management, performance issues, and more might be coined as common cloud storage problems coming with the entire system.  

Luckily, the solution is not in development. It’s already real and is established on enterprise levels. 

One of the most effective solutions to this problem, quite popular with the users, is the multi-cloud approach. It remarkably saves you from the trouble of vendor lock-ins. 

Most cloud service providers use the most advanced data encryption policies to help them maintain complete end-to-end data privacy and control. Better data compliance norms with current practices of data monitoring and audits also increase safety in using and managing large volumes of data.

Next comes the big data solutions, which can effectively engineer flexible and scalable storage options in the cloud environment. As you already know, big data is probably the only solution to manage storage, analysis, and a lot more data with large volumes. 

Future Trends in Cloud Storage 

We’re going to look at three major trends in the cloud storage environment 

Of course, AI-driven cloud storage manages automation and enhances the power and performance of cloud storage solutions quite effectively. 

As mentioned earlier, big data solutions are becoming one of the widespread solutions to help cloud servers deal with large-volume data and manage extensive data workforces. 

As mentioned earlier in this post, multi-cloud systems have already become popular, which shows the potential to increase data privacy. Added to this system, a hybrid cloud storage approach is gaining the attention of industry leaders as an advanced cloud storage solution.  

To Conclude  

What if you need cloud storage solutions and you get it right here and right now?

Welcome to Databuzz. We are one of the leading as well as popular data and cloud service providers to help you with curated cloud storage solutions in the best ways possible. 

Talk to us to find cost-effective and scalable cloud storage solutions to secure and manage your data without hiccups. 

To learn more about us, ring us at +44 2080588579 or choose to drop a message to support@databuzzltd.com anytime you want.