Companies should differentiate between perceived and real security threats when it comes to cloud computing, said an expert.

Cloud security has been one of the biggest concerns among IT decision makers as they consider how best to transition applications and data out of the corporate data center and into the cloud, according to Steve Bailey, regional operations director at CommVault Systems, a developer of data management systems.

A perceived lack of cloud security can sometimes stop an IT organisation dead in its tracks when they look at the cloud as an option for data storage, Bailey said.

Many industries, like healthcare and financial services, have always been held to a higher standard than other organizations when it comes to regulatory compliance and data retention, which prevents them from taking a “risk” on the cloud.

This unjustified fear of lax cloud security also means they lose out on all of the business, cost and operational benefits that can come with storing data in the cloud.

The reality is that all of the pieces are in place to enable secure and compliant cloud-based storage environments, and the technology is sound. It’s time that IT organizations rethink their position on cloud security by looking at the facts.

The economic benefits that come with storing data in the cloud are too great to ignore for any IT organization struggling with data management. Because cloud storage providers leverage multi-tenant architectures, infrastructure costs are shared across many users.

This helps lower costs substantially versus on-site solutions, which require additional provisioning, power, cooling costs, and more, Bailey said.

As data volumes continue to increase, many companies find themselves pushing the capacity, cooling and power limitations of their existing data centers. Meanwhile, regulations require many businesses to keep ever-growing amounts of data for compliance purposes.

This three-way balancing act between capacity, compliance and cost requires a flexible, multi-tier approach that makes cloud storage an attractive alternative, according to Bailey.

While many organisations benefit today from keeping online, deduplicated data copies available for fast recovery, massive growth will still require more disk and tape to contain exploding amounts of data.

Cloud storage offers a low-cost tier of storage that enables several new compliance, disaster recovery, and data backup solutions. More readily available than offline vaulted data, cloud-based storage delivers these key use cases to help solve today’s data management problems, Bailey concluded. – TradeArabia News Service