Is cloud the answer to all your storage problems? The ‘information explosion’ has become a cliché of the IT industry. Pretty much every storage vendor presentation, press release and sales brochure will tell you that data volumes are increasing exponentially, before pitching whatever product or service is being punted. As discussed in a previous article, however, the focus …
Such as Megaupload etc., with Rapidshare being the most recent to throw the towel in real soon now.
https://torrentfreak.com/file-sharing-icon-rapidshare-shuts-150210/
To be fair, there's a world of difference between an corporate oriented provider, and one that hopes to make money slinging ads.
Most of the dodgier filesharing sites worked by hosting copyright material and charging users to download it, with the promise of a cut of the action for the uploaders.
However you're still at risk of single point of failure - plus having data stolen (unless you encrypt it, and face jail time in Camerons Britain).
I don't even have any cloud accounts. Don't need or want one. All my data is stored encrypted on a 1TB drive with copies on a 2nd similar drive stored away from the first (in case of fire).
Such drives are dirt cheap nowadays; how much would it cost to upload/download 1TB to the cloud? How secure is data on the cloud? What if the cloud company goes tits up? Cloud: No thank you.
That and the fact that for cloud storage you generally need to use a web browser or some sort of customer application to upload and download your data. With a disk drive you get a drive letter/mount point.
I've got two external HDDs hanging off cheapo Raspberry Pis, in two locations 400 miles apart. I can get to them anywhere in the world via VPN. These also do many other things, are encrypted and nobody has access other than me. Why on Earth would I need cloud storage?
Back in the corporate world, it still amazes me how many people put so much overkill into storage. OK, so tier 1 applications are going to need something good, but for a dumping ground you don't need fancy pants storage arrays. A couple of cheap arse Linux/BSD boxes with a bunch of disk drives in two or more distinct locations with rsync set up is all that's needed in most cases.
>The people who have spent years building expensive, overly complex inhouse storage systems are hardly going to vote for the cloud option, are they?
You're right. They're probably not going to be tempted by being locked into overly complex, outsourced cloud options over which they have no control and no confidence.
Indeed.
"We need to keep the encryption keys here, we need them to keep them secure, it's part of our compliance requirements. No, you don't understand, we NEED to retain all copies of the keys, you can't have them, it's a requirement of our compliance"
"Still don't get it? OK, goodbye Mr massive corporate cloud provider, we'll spend our cash with NetApp thanks.".
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