Unterstanding the Factors that Drive Cloud Technology Adoption

With the escalating price war between Amazon, Google, Microsoft and other cloud vendors, the cost of utilizing their services has dropped to the point where you have to pause and seriously evaluate how the cloud will impact enterprise computing efforts today and into the future. You can’t ignore it anymore.

One way to put this scenario into perspective is by comparing it to the technology adoption lifecycle curve made famous by Geoffrey Moore in his book Crossing the Chasm. In this context some examples of cloud innovators are the likes of Amazon, who built, consumed and marketed their cloud infrastructure along with Salesforce which pioneered and refined the concept of Software as a Service (SaaS). One could also argue that early cloud backup vendors such as Arsenal Digital and Mozy should also be included in this group. Early adopter customers of these services were driven by need; they didn’t have the resources to deploy software and infrastructure to support their business requirements, or were innovators themselves who appreciated the flexibility and low entry costs that cloud-based infrastructure and applications offered.

Interestingly, backup may have been the killer app that contributed the most to powering early acceptance of the cloud, simply because it helped users get comfortable with their data residing outside of their firewall on public cloud storage. Once this milestone occurs in an organization other opportunities to leverage the cloud are quickly investigated including:

• Utilizing cloud services to test new applications
  
  
• Moving legacy or lightly used applications to the cloud
  
  
• Storage tiering – moving infrequently accessed data and archives to lower cost storage alternatives vs. the high performance NAS/SAN systems on a local network
  
  
• Business continuity, also known as disaster recovery
  
  
• Replacing aging servers and storage systems with lower cost cloud-based infrastructure

As organizations discover the advantages of a hybrid cloud architecture that enables them to comingle existing storage with lower cost cloud-based storage capacity, storage tiering and disaster recovery (DR) become the next logical steps to cloud adoption. Storage tiering is fairly straight forward as it can be managed via software, and most users don’t even notice that it is in place because they still have access to their files and data. DR is really interesting when it comes to the topic of cloud adoption as it is basically a Trojan Horse. It touches nearly everyone in an organization, and once cloud-based DR is implemented, overall cloud adoption becomes self-fulfilling as the learning curve for deploying mission critical applications and infrastructure in the cloud will be completed and the cloud becomes culturally accepted.

At this point, the organization will be in position to utilize the cloud for deploying new applications leading to increased agility, scalability and ROI.

In fact, organizations that have gone down this path are reporting 60-80% cost savings, sometimes even more.

As mentioned earlier, this is hard to ignore. Ready to get started? 

Moving to a hybrid cloud architecture requires three basic components:

• Data management software to securely manage on premises and remote backup, archiving, storage tiering, and data replication to support storage centric productivity applications such as file sharing and collaboration

• Storage hardware that is cloud-enabled and eases implementation of a hybrid architecture

• A cloud infrastructure and computing platform vendor with a global network of data centers

A best-of-breed example of this combination is Peer Software and Microsoft StorSimple. We recently teamed up to deliver cloud-integrated storage (CiS) solutions that seamlessly integrate high performance on-premises storage with scalable, cost-effective public cloud storage services on Microsoft Azure.

Consolidating primary storage, archive, backup and disaster recovery into a CiS environment is a great way to leverage a hybrid cloud architecture, and best of all the price is right. Moving to the cloud is easier than ever starting today.

Contact us to learn more about the advantages of Cloud Integrated Storage.