Enterprises have realized the potential advantages of storage as a service. The idea is to let organizations buy storage in the same way they buy other cloud services.
Using service-based consumption, enterprises lease on-premises storage from an MSP, public cloud vendor or storage vendor. AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure public clouds enable users to scale storage and move data from local storage to a cloud archive.
Most large storage vendors, such as Dell, HPE and Pure Storage, offer storage infrastructure with native cloud storage integration capabilities. In some cases, vendors also offer traditional storage appliances and meter storage use, thereby enabling those devices to function as storage as a service (STaaS).
DevOps organizations use STaaS to keep pace with soaring data growth generated by modern cloud and edge applications. Here are six advantages of using the cloud to procure and manage on-premises storage, as well as potential drawbacks to consider.
1. Avoid upfront Capex
STaaS enables users to better rationalize storage spending. Organizations can buy capacity as needed through the cloud. Procurement and provisioning occur dynamically.
Paying for storage by usage can turn it into Opex. Consumption-based pricing prevents organizations from having to make large, upfront investments in storage. If an organization uses storage in a consistent manner, then STaaS delivers predictable pricing, simplifying the IT budgeting process.
2. Automate scalability
Storage consumed as a service enables data centers to flexibly scale capacity up or down as business needs change. For example, a retailer that needs more IT resources during its busy season could dynamically procure the storage resources it needs without investing in IT hardware. When demand wanes at the end of the season, the retailer could relinquish those extra resources, thereby reducing costs.
STaaS improves visibility into how an organization uses data, making it easier to reduce sprawl and keep costs in check.
3. Eliminate complexities
Related to scalability, storage automation replaces manual tasks to manage, maintain and upgrade storage infrastructure. Thus, storage teams can concentrate on issues of greater strategic importance to the business.
4. Improve capacity planning
Storage refresh planning is complex and time-consuming. The IT team maps out new hardware configurations, determines compute and network requirements, and vets competing storage products.
This traditional approach to storage refresh also means that an organization must anticipate its future storage needs and pay for that storage in advance, often long before needing the full capacity. The time from purchase to delivery and deployment of new storage hardware often spans several weeks, perhaps months.
By using STaaS, organizations can pay for storage as needed, rather than finding a way to predict how much storage will be needed in the future and paying for that storage upfront. Additionally, acquiring storage as an on-demand cloud service enables admins to expand capacity whenever they need extra storage. This process can be completed in minutes.
5. Optimize storage management and service levels
Vendors offer STaaS subscriptions as fully managed or self-managed.
With the fully managed option, the cloud provider, MSP or storage vendor analyzes the customer’s workloads to design storage that best serves application needs. It then manages the storage on the customer’s behalf. If the storage is cloud-based, then the storage is available as a managed service. In the case of hardware residing on-premises, the vendor deploys and then remotely manages it.
With the self-managed option, the customer handles day-to-day storage management. Organizations that must retain local control of data for business or compliance reasons often prefer this option.
6. Integrate and upgrade existing storage
Major storage vendors offer integrated cloud arrays that mirror the deployment and procurement model of top cloud providers. These hardware-based storage systems contain APIs for writing data to the public cloud. A partial list of storage vendor STaaS platforms includes the following:
Many storage vendors offer fixed service bundles to customers directly and through channel partners.
Possible drawbacks of STaaS
While there are significant advantages of storage as a service, there are also some drawbacks to consider — STaaS is not ideally suited to every company or workload:
- Cloud egress charges. Using the public cloud to migrate on-premises data has many advantages, but if you later decide to bring that data back on-site or even move it to a different vendor’s cloud storage, you can incur egress charges. Data egress charges are punitive fees designed to discourage customers from taking their data out of the cloud.
- Data protection. STaaS providers typically don’t bundle backup and data protection in the monthly fee. Those tasks are the organization’s responsibility and factor into any cost-benefit analysis.
- Minimum monthly commitments. Vendors sometimes require customers to purchase a set minimum of terabytes of storage per month. Make sure to understand the organization’s current capacity needs and rate of data growth before agreeing to these types of service quotas.
- Hidden costs. Although STaaS is often billed on a per gigabyte, per month basis, costs can increase because of data egress fees, API calls, excessive bandwidth consumption, or even data backups and restorations.
- Security and compliance. Most STaaS vendors adhere to the shared responsibility model in which the customers are responsible for keeping their own data secure. Additionally, using STaaS means that you have to take the extra step of knowing where in the world your data resides to avoid violating any data sovereignty requirements.
Garry Kranz is a former senior news writer for TechTarget. He spent more than 13 years as a freelance business and technology writer, including 10 years as a contributor to TechTarget.
Brien Posey is a former 22-time Microsoft MVP and a commercial astronaut candidate. In his more than 30 years in IT, he has served as a lead network engineer for the U.S. Department of Defense and a network administrator for some of the largest insurance companies in America.
