What are storage solutions?
Most businesses consider data to be one of the most treasured assets. Data provides statistics and essential facts to enhance business operations or measure external and internal business activities. Tim Berners-Lee, the World Wide Web inventor, said, “data is a precious thing and will last longer than the systems themselves.” Robert Cailliau, a Belgian informatics engineer who collaborated with Tim to develop the World Wide Web, also stated, “when we have all data online, it will be great for humanity. It is a prerequisite to solving many problems that humankind faces.”
Based on the importance of data, organizations need to make informed decisions on the most suitable storage solutions to ensure robust data security and availability. The solutions enable companies to store data in electronic form in a machine-readable format.
The current business landscape requires organizations to collect data from various sources. Due to its importance, companies continue to increase the data collection capabilities. Besides, there is increased availability of data due to the proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT) and mobile devices. Currently, businesses and individual users generate at least 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day, with the amount expected to rise significantly in the coming years.
While companies use and discard some of the data, they need to identify robust storage solutions for vital data to ascertain availability and security. Data storage solutions consist of the various physical media used to store and retain business data such that users can retrieve it to meet different objectives.
What is the purpose of storage solutions?
Identifying the appropriate data storage solution is essential to business development since modern organizations depend on data to make informed business decisions, discover and penetrate new markets, and create new services and products. Companies require a data storage solution to ensure convenient management and access to available business data. A practical solution provides access to all authorized users despite their location or device used to access data.
Moreover, a data storage solution plays a crucial role in protecting sensitive business information from unauthorized parties and breaches. In this case, organizations need to implement suitable redundancies to ascertain constant data availability, prevent data theft, and prevent inaccessibility issues resulting from system downtime.
Data storage systems should incorporate multiple storage units or devices to facilitate easier management. Irrespective of the preferred solution, a company needs to implement a data storage solution aligned to its capabilities and needs. When choosing a data storage solution, some of the factors to consider are the organizational computing network, customer demands, and data accessibility to legitimate users.
What is the difference between cloud and on-premise storage?
On-premise data storage is one of the traditional methods used to store company data in servers and storage units located within an organization’s premises. The enterprise owns the storage units and is responsible for maintaining and securing them. However, larger organizations may house the servers in a private data center located in a different location from the premises. However, in most cases, an on-premise data storage solution comprises a few machines stored in a dedicated, secured data room.
Despite the form the data takes, the defining attribute of on-premise data solutions is the organization which takes complete responsibility for securing it and building, developing and maintaining the storage infrastructure. An on-premise storage deployment solution provides an organization maximum control of its networks and data. However, this comes at a cost since developing and maintaining an on-premise data storage solution is expensive. Installation and deployment require an enterprise to acquire costly data storage infrastructure and incur installation and maintenance costs.
On the other hand, the cloud storage solution is today the most popular data storage solution, especially for small and medium-sized enterprises. It is an inexpensive data storage approach where a company pays to a service provider only for the data storage space it uses. The primary attributes of cloud storage include on-demand service, where a company chooses the amount of storage required at any time. In contrast to on-premise storage, cloud solutions offer rapid scalability and elasticity to enable customers to acquire more storage space as data increases. It is also essential to note that while the cloud service provider is responsible for most cloud data security, the customer also requires implementing robust policies and security controls to prevent unauthorized access.
Advantages and disadvantages of storage solutions?
The advantages of data storage solutions include:
1. Accessibility and usability: Most solutions permit users to access and use data from any location or device.
2. Saving costs: When using cloud storage solutions, customers can save costs significantly since they pay per use. Besides, they don’t incur costs in maintaining the hardware or software infrastructure.
3. Disaster recovery: Since data is one of the essential business components today, storing data can assist in recovering from a disaster in the event of a cyber-attack.
4. Security: Strongdata storage solutions are essential requirements of protecting data from unauthorized access, breaches, modifications, or data theft.
The following are the primary challenges of data storage solutions:
1. Internet connectivity: cloud-based data storage solutions rely on internet connectivity to permit users to access data.
2. High maintenance costs: For on-premise solutions, the high installation and maintenance costs of data storage infrastructure is the main challenge.
Which potential threats are there regarding storage solutions?
The primary reason for storing data is to use it for valuable business operations. Attackers can target the data due to financial or other types of motivations. The following are the potential threats regarding data storage solutions:
1. Social engineering threats: Malicious cyber actors use social engineering methods to trick users into revealing sensitive data or deploy malware
programs in the data storage solutions. The malware can be used to exfiltrate colossal data volumes.
2. Insider threats: Insider threats are among the most dangerous since they have full access to data storage solutions. They can use the access
privileges to share valuable data with external adversaries.
3. Using shadow IT: Some employees may use a third-party software, internet services, or applications to access sensitive data. Using shadow IT
creates a security blind spot in the security approaches designed to secure data storage solutions and cause unauthorized access incidences.
4. Physical theft of storage devices: Storage units like hard drives can end up in the wrong hands if a company fails to ensure sufficient physical
security controls.
5. Unauthorized Access: Cloud provider themselves can access data if not protected specifically.
What are the most common storage solutions?
The following statistics illustrate the most common data storage solutions in 2021.
Cloud Storage: Cloud storage solutions are expected to increase, with analysts forecasting the market to reach $297.54 by 2027 from the current market size of $49.13 billion. By 2022, companies planning to use cloud services are expected to increase by 20%. Cloud experts estimate the use of cloud-sharing services to rise by 10% by 2022
High-Capacity Hard Disk Drives (HDD): The number of organizations planning to use high-capacity hard disk drives is forecasted to increase by 17% by 2022. A hard disk drive is what most people imagine when they picture a traditional computer hard drive. This solution stores data on a disk scanned by a sensor arm with read-write capabilities.
Flash Data Storage and Solid State Drive (SSD): Unlike HDDs, SSDs feature no moving parts. They store data using NAND flash memory on a microchip. SSD can read data much faster than HDDs, sometimes four times faster. The global SSD market that had a total of USD 21.78 billion in 2017 is projected to rise by USD 50.72 billion by 2023. All-flash data storage solutions, including SSDs and non-volatile memory express (NVMe), are gaining popularity, with experts estimating an increase of 14% by 2022.
Persistent Memory Technologies: Persistent memory technologies, such as Intel Optane, help companies reduce the performance gap between Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) and SSDs. The use of the technology is estimated to increase by 12% by 2022.
Hyper Convergent Storage: At least 46% of companies use hyper convergent data storage infrastructure, which combines virtualization, networking, server, and storage solutions into one scalable package.
Software-Defined Storage Technology: Currently, at least 40% of companies utilize software-defined storage technology or storage virtualization tech.
Always secure data in storage solutions
Whether you store data in the cloud or by using on-premise storage solutions, you need to ensure data security to prevent industrial espionage, organized hacker attacks, viruses, social engineering, and other digital threats. Businesses should prioritize data security in storage devices to prevent incidents that result in reputation damage, high recovery costs, reduced revenues, and regulatory penalties.
You can leverage secure solutions to protect data in the most secure way. Organizations can utilize the right set of tools to prevent unauthorized access or manipulation (copy, overwrite, modify, delete, or insert) of data in storage locations.