Outsourcing IT - Storage & Cloud Computing

Cloud storage

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In addition to the storage itself, SSPs typically offer back-up and archiving, remotely-managed storage, and some also offer the ability to consolidate data from multiple locations to enable effective data sharing. Customers can be billed at a monthly rate and for each managed terabyte of storage.

Cloud-Based Outsourcing

The SSP market is still relatively small, but IT service organisations such as IBM and other types of service providers are entering the market as they realise it is a crucial part of their overall offering. Telecoms companies are also beginning to offer a type of SSP service.

Devices and technologies have their own life cycles and obsolescence. As corporate IT becomes more distributed, with mobile devices, laptops, home working and collaboration becoming commonplace, data storage and back-up has to evolve. Business needs are changing fast and storage has to adapt to meet them.

All this requires a structured process just as much as other aspects of IT. Fears about handing over a vital business asset to a third party have held back storage outsourcing in many enterprises, except where it is part of outsourcing the entire IT operation. However, critical appraisal shows that the overall quality of service given by an SSP often exceeds that from an internal department.

The main advantages are the economies of scale and specialist expertise that an external organisation brings. Storage networks are complex entities to build and operate, and few small or medium-sized organisations have the in-house skills needed.

Many organisations that would benefit from using a storage service are unaware of the fact because they are not accurately accounting for storage costs. Traditional storage has been regarded as an integral part of the computing infrastructure and its capital and operating costs have not been separated from those of the application servers. While most organisations use an outsourced service as part of their disaster recovery strategy, only a small proportion of them outsource frontline storage.

You can choose different service providers for these two roles, but there is an advantage in gaining the synergy that comes from using a single provider. Service level agreements SLAs should be a key consideration in choosing a provider.

One more step

If storage is outsourced you must have confidence in the financial stability of the supplier, and the SLA must be mutually acceptable. The service provider must prove that it is capable of delivering the agreed level of service. SLAs are key to establishing trust and accountability in this emerging market. It is disappointing that the industry is not yet offering the sort of SLA that promises to protect customers' data and provide full compensation in the event of failure. While you should push for promises in the core areas of the service, you have to be prepared to accept what is on offer.

In the present state of the business the existence of the SLA is more important than its precise provisions. A relatively good SLA shows that the service provider cares about what it is delivering and that it has some confidence in its ability to do so.

Some users rarely invoke SLAs, feeling that negotiation is more fruitful than confrontation. Current practice is to limit the SLA to covering the delivery of the service, specifying the proportion of time when the service is live and the response times for customer enquiries. Compensation is usually small, and mainly paid in the form of free service periods, rather than cash. Consequential business risks are never included. In future service providers must recognise their customers' dependence on their services and provide guarantees, including insurance for business risk.

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Forrester: The impact of cloud on outsourcing contracts

Please check the box if you want to proceed. Only then will storage outsourcing represent a mature business proposition. Katy Ring is director of e-business research, Ovum. The gathering at EmTech explored whether blockchain solutions could give the world a new model of trust.

The Apple event may not have wowed on the smartphone front, but the new Watch Series 4, with a built-in ECG, could be a hit Andrew Larkin, from the Cloud Academy, explains why successful cloud migration strategies require more than just a 'lift and In , Box announced an online file sharing and personal cloud content management service for businesses. Cloud storage is based on highly virtualized infrastructure and is like broader cloud computing in terms of accessible interfaces, near-instant elasticity and scalability , multi-tenancy , and metered resources.

Cloud storage typically refers to a hosted object storage service, but the term has broadened to include other types of data storage that are now available as a service, like block storage.

Outsourcing data storage increases the attack surface area. Companies are not permanent and the services and products they provide can change. Outsourcing data storage to another company needs careful investigation and nothing is ever certain. Contracts set in stone can be worthless when a company ceases to exist or its circumstances change.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. This article is about enterprise-level cloud data storage. For consumer-level file hosting services, see file hosting service. This section may be too technical for most readers to understand.

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Please help improve it to make it understandable to non-experts , without removing the technical details. December Learn how and when to remove this template message. New England Publications Inc. Volume 1, Number 1: Silicon Valley Business Journal. Retrieved October 2, International Journal of Information Management. CRN June 22,

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