Public Cloud Storage Evaluation Guide

Evaluating AWS, Azure and GCP Storage Services

Evaluator Group primary research shows that a large majority of enterprise IT organizations see a hybrid cloud architecture that establishes connectivity and integration with multiple public clouds as an ultimate objective. This necessarily means that they will be users of different and often disparate public cloud storage services. Our research points to:

• A projected 20%+ growth in cloud storage spending by enterprise IT users within the next 2 years.
• Uncertainty with regard to where the greater percentage of storage spending will fall over the next 2 years—data center versus public cloud—and the likelihood that the majority of users will continue to be pragmatic when making buying decisions.
• The perception among users that, while cloud storage generally costs more than on-premises data center storage, the premium is worth that cost in terms of agility gained and on-premises staff responsibilities avoided.

While it is clear that public cloud storage usage will grow among enterprise IT users, we have found certain challenges will be faced. From our survey, interviews and client engagements we see that these include:

• Security
• Cost
• Performance
• Interoperability/inconsistent standards

From the research work we developed several areas which need to be addressed during the evaluation.

Key Considerations

Know the Cloud Storage Environment

Cloud storage is different, but some would say in a good way. There are ways to tune for performance, optimize cost efficiency, and automate processes that are likely not available in on-premises storage environments. Getting to know them can be difficult at first but well worth the effort. As one respondent put it:

“Transactional behavior has to be well understood. You have to understand the storage-level instructions.”

The three keys to understanding storage in the cloud are:

• The path to cloud storage
• The storage tiers available
• IOPS provisioning

To expand on this theme, we note that the default assumption in the Cloud is storage is not highly available, but rather highly durable.  That is, access may be temporarily lost for storage, and applications should be architected to handle this resiliently.  In contrast many traditional IT applications expect storage to be both highly durable but also highly available with nearly instantaneous failover, not so in the cloud unless using specific storage constructs along with applications designed for the cloud.

Evaluation Guide Includes: 

• Introduction
• Key Considerations
• Overall Comparative Impressions
• Evaluator Group Assessment

Download the free Evaluation Guide now!