Considering turning to the cloud to solve your business’s storage issues? Here are some reasons you should – and why you should stay away.
Cloud storage services do offer a lower cost per gigabyte than on-premise storage, Gartner analyst Stanley Zaffos said during a presentation at the research firm’s recent IT Infrastructure, Operations and Management Summit in Orlando, FL.
Zaffos estimated the cost of in-house storage to be between 75 cents and a dollar per gigabyte per month, compared to three cents per gigabyte per month for cloud storage.
However, he also pointed out the downsides of cloud services that could make businesses think twice, as Network World reports.
One issue is bandwidth: Added bandwidth charges incurred while moving data back and forth can often exceed the cost of actually storing the data, Zaffos said.
Another problem can be the latency experienced when accessing data stored in the cloud.
One key, Zaffos said, is deciding whether or not an application belongs in the cloud. The answer should be no for those that are heavily transactional, require a lot of input and output and involve sensitive data, he said.