Cloud Services - Storage, Sync, Share

There is a great of information out there about "The Cloud". This site give a bit of background on Cloud Storage, Cloud Computing, Synchronization and Sharing of data. Much of the text was gained from Wikipedia and other sources.

Let's talk about Cloud Storage:  

Cloud storage is a model of networked enterprise storage where data is stored in virtualized pools of storage which are generally hosted by third parties. Hosting companies operate large data centers, and people who require their data to be hosted buy or lease storage capacity from them. The data center operators, in the background, virtualize the resources according to the requirements of the customer and expose them as storage pools, which the customers can themselves use to store files or data objects. Physically, the resource may span across multiple servers and multiple locations. The safety of the files depends upon the hosting companies, and on the applications that leverage the cloud storage.

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Cloud storage is based on highly virtualized infrastructure and has the same characteristics as cloud computing in terms of agility, scalability, elasticity and multi-tenancy, and is available both off-premises  and on-premises.

Cloud storage is made up of many distributed resources, but still acts as one, highly fault tolerant through redundancy and distribution of data, highly durable through the creation of versioned copies and typically eventually consistent with regard to data replicas.

Some advantages are:

•             Companies need only pay for the storage they actually use, typically an average of consumption during a month. This does not mean that cloud storage is less expensive, only that it incurs operating expenses rather than capital expenses.

•             Organizations can choose between off-premises and on-premises cloud storage options, or a mixture of the two options, depending on relevant decision criteria that is complementary to initial direct cost savings potential; for instance, continuity of operations, disaster recovery, security, and records retention laws, regulations, and policies.

•             Storage availability and data protection is intrinsic to object storage architecture, so depending on the application, the additional technology, effort and cost to add availability and protection can be eliminated.

•             Storage maintenance tasks, such as purchasing additional storage capacity, are offloaded to the responsibility of a service provider.

•             Cloud storage provides users with immediate access to a broad range of resources and applications hosted in the infrastructure of another organization via a web service interface.

•             Cloud storage can be used for copying virtual machine images from the cloud to on-premises locations or to import a virtual machine image from an on-premises location to the cloud image library. In addition, cloud storage can be used to move virtual machine images between user accounts or between data centers.

•             Many Cloud Storage providers offer free accounts which can be expanded through various techniques, which many people have started to take advantage of to get hundreds of gigabytes of free online storage.

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