The public cloud is often equated with efficiency, savings and agility. And it’s growing fast. According to Statista, global spending on public cloud computing has almost tripled in the last five years, from $243BN in 2019 to (projected) $678BN in 2024.
At first glance, it might seem logical that it is cheaper to move the responsibility for owning and managing storage, compute and networking resources to a public cloud provider. However, this is not always the case.
While migrating to the cloud can be an ideal and cost-effective option for many organizations, it is not the perfect solution that we are led to believe. High egress fees can pose an unforeseen challenge, undermining the cost benefits initially expected from moving to the cloud. And security, data sovereignty and performance are among other factors that must be taken into account before making the leap.
1. Scalability
The ability to easily grow or reduce a system, scaling up and down on demand, is often touted as one of the major advantages of the cloud. Yet how often do organizations need to downsize their storage system?
Data is growing at a rapid pace and in the vast majority of cases, organizations will need to continually grow their storage capacity as they generate and collect ever more data, expand their businesses and introduce new programs or workloads. When building out a list of requirements, one should ask if the ability to scale down as well as up is really needed.
2. Costs
Variable costs of the public cloud can present critical challenges to IT teams’ budgets. While it is easy to plan for the fixed monthly fees, variable costs are harder to predict. For example, egress fees can increase or decrease according to the quantity of requests from applications or end-users for data stored in the cloud. Make sure to account for these variable costs alongside the fixed price when building out your budget.
Comparing total cost of ownership of an on-premises system with its cloud-based counterpart is worth the time and can result in significant savings. An analysis carried out for an agency comparing the cost of a cloud-based and an on-premises backup solution found that the cloud was significantly more expensive, even when factoring in the upfront expenses.
This cost difference would have been even greater since the public cloud’s network bandwidth would have had to be improved in order to meet the company’s recovery time objective (RTO) requirement. In this scenario, on-premises was deemed the optimal solution, offering constant costs and superior performance.
3. Security
With the numbers of cyber attacks skyrocketing, security and data protection is business critical for all organizations. Whether in the cloud or on-premises, businesses must? make sure to prioritize immutability and a zero-trust approach when analyzing the most suitable storage location for their workloads.
Immutability is emerging as a critical element in organizations’ security arsenal as it ensures that when data is written, it is then “untouchable” and immune to deletion or alteration. This is especially important for cloud backups, which are becoming an increasingly popular target for ransomware attackers; without their backups, organizations cannot restore their data and are more likely to pay a ransom.
When it comes to immutability, not all forms provide the same level of protection with some leaving a window of exposure. Native object storage solutions are differentiated from other forms of immutable storage at the architectural layer, which means they preserve data in its original form the instant it is written and never overwrite existing data.
Snapshots can help as part of a comprehensive ransomware strategy. However, traditional snapshotting is less viable with the modern scale and capacity of data, with vast numbers of files and the need for a high frequency of snapshots.
Thankfully, that’s beginning to change with new technology. For example, our own snapshot tech allows for data management even with billions of files and multi-petabyte data requirements.
But returning to the question of cost and egress fees when considering security – if you store data in the public cloud, how much are you willing to pay to restore their data in the event of a ransomware attack?
4. Classifications
In cloud and on-premises systems alike, it is critical to get data classification right. IT teams must avoid any data spillage, ensuring that data is not accidentally written to a lower classification system than it should. This is not always a simple task, especially in the public cloud where different clouds are provided to support different classifications.
In addition, teams must ensure that everyone supporting a public cloud has the necessary clearances, especially bearing in mind any potential data spill. These challenges can also arise in on-premises setups, however organizations typically have already refined their methodologies and can rely on staff with the required clearances.
5. File vs block vs object
The vast majority of data stored on expensive block and files systems is untouched. It is estimated that 80% has not been accessed in the previous 90 days, and this percentage tends to increase over longer time periods. To reduce the size requirements of those costly systems and improve backup times, it is worth considering leveraging lower-cost solutions such as a scalable object archive.
6. Performance
Typically it takes longer to write to the cloud than to on-premises systems. For example, in an organization that has just one or two gateways to the internet, the data would have to first be sent via the WAN to a gateway, which could be in a different office, and from there to the cloud. Take time to assess current and future performance needs before deciding between a cloud or on-premises system.
7. Data sovereignty
It is critical to have a clear understanding of where an organization’s data is stored, even when in the cloud. IT teams must be able to track the location of their data to comply with local data residency regulations. This must be considered carefully before deciding whether or not to move workloads to the cloud, or which cloud provider to select.
As you’re no doubt aware, the EU has taken the lead in enacting legislation in this area. Balancing that legislation with business growth is tricky though. Practical measures, such as encouraging interoperability standards, private cloud adoption, support for the Buy European Act and funding of cloud infrastructure scale-ups will help with this continued cloud transition.
With innumerable factors involved, the decision of whether to move workloads to the cloud or to keep them on premises is not a simple one. To help navigate these complexities, consider the points discussed above. Taking these factors into account will help you arrive at the best decision for both users and budgets, and avoid any unwelcome surprises down the line.
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