Cloud storage providers are increasingly keen to address the particular needs of enterprises. Dropbox, one of the leading names in the consumer cloud, acquired Readmill in March 2014 in order to integrate that company's HTML-based reading capabilities into Dropbox, potentially boosting its appeal to the many organizations that regularly rely on secure, high-performance file sharing and synchronization. Along the way, Dropbox, like many of its peers, aims to transition from the increasingly commoditized storage vendor space to a more sustainable business model built around enterprise services and collaboration. The end goal is a rich ecosystem with many contributions from third-party partners and ongoing refinement of features by the community.
However, so far Dropbox and others such as Box have been effectively blacklisted by many IT departments due to the perceived shortcomings of their services in areas pertaining to security and flexibility. Plus, despite the ongoing decline in the cost of public IaaS, these would-be weaknesses have deterred enterprises from adopting storage solutions on the basis of price and/or convenience alone. As Vineet Jain, CEO of Egnyte - a Seagate Cloud Builder Alliance partner - pointed out in VentureBeat, enterprises have different requirements than consumers and would rarely, if ever, sacrifice security and performance just to save money.
What exactly do enterprises want from cloud storage? Good economics are certainly near the top of the list, especially in light of how much information companies now manage. Accordingly, cloud storage systems must be both cost-effective and scalable. Moreover, they must enable long-term business viability by ensuring that assets are securely handled, free from the specter of surveillance or data leakage. Recent revelations about Dropbox's copyright enforcement system – which likely involves the scanning of uploaded files - speak to these specific types of cloud platform risks that enterprises must avoid.
Most enterprises still prefer private cloud infrastructure
Even with the potential savings afforded by SaaS and IaaS, it is perhaps no surprise that a substantial share of enterprises still prefer the private cloud. "Enterprise Cloud Storage Report," a survey of 200 IT professionals conducted by Research Now for CTERA at the start of 2014, found that 63 percent of respondents preferred storage in hosted infrastructure or their own data centers to remotely managed solutions.
"Enterprises are seeking ways to capitalize on the benefits that cloud storage can provide, but not at the cost of losing control of their data," stated Rani Osnat, vice president of strategic marketing and customer experience at CTERA. "The market is flooded with SaaS offerings, but solutions that can scale on private and hybrid clouds are in short supply."
The report also revealed that, for now at least, enterprises are leveraging the cloud in targeted areas, rather than as a panacea for all IT requirements. For example, one-quarter of the surveyed professionals stated that their organizations were using file synchronization and sharing solutions, underscoring the tremendous demand for services in this specific area. Dropbox's Readmill acquisition, like Box's recent IPO announcement, comes at a time when companies are just getting a feel for how to properly manage files across different on-premises and public cloud environments. They are keen to extend key services to mobile devices, enable company-wide collaboration and manage storage.
Enterprises have good reasons for seeking secure, robust FSS products. Nearly one-third of respondents reported data leakage in 2013 as a result of unsanctioned FSS usage, while 71 percent feared data breaches. To protect assets, 45 percent of organizations are considering private cloud FSS, and more than half of companies with more than 30,000 employees have forbidden the usage of SaaS solutions for FSS. Overall, the private cloud is set to play an important role in the increasingly complex computing, storage and networking environments that companies now utilize.
Opening up the private cloud to better handle workloads
That said, many enterprises are still going to grapple with the introduction of public cloud services, especially for workflows such as development and testing. Although public IaaS may seem like a huge pool of unacceptable risk that can only be avoided through the safety of the private cloud, in reality the distinction is not so cut and dried. It is increasingly feasible for companies to rely on the private cloud for workflows that demand the utmost control, while running other tasks on the public cloud to obtain optimal capacity and scalability. Efficiently managing data is not a choice between going all-in on an unsecure FSS solution or sticking with the same old on-premises infrastructure.
"The choice between a public and private cloud path often feels like a binary one to companies. It doesn't have to be," argued CloudBees senior vice president of products Steve Harris for Computerworld UK. "As with any software system, selecting the right interface is critical to solving problems today while opening up future options. Fortunately, enterprise investment in service-oriented architecture has laid the groundwork to evolve systems in ways that take advantage of public cloud strengths – massive elasticity, on-demand resources, service at scale. One of the most natural and cost-effective fits for public cloud systems is to move development, continuous integration and testing to the public cloud."
Using cloud computing services well requires adroit management of risks and costs. Sometimes finding the most effective, economical solutions to a problem necessitates assessing them based on how feasibly they can be integrated into existing infrastructure, rather than which broad bucket – "public" or "private" – they seem to fit into. Enterprise cloud storage products and services that leverage inexpensive, industry-standard drives and/or fundamental technologies such as Ethernet demonstrate how companies can manage large volumes of data without having to break the bank, weave-in various proprietary components and/or worry about data security.
In breaking down the sometimes superficial distinction between public and private cloud, Harris pointed to platform-as-a-service as something that enterprises should be mindful of, even if they think that public cloud – most likely IaaS – is not going to play a significant role in the near or mid future. Much of the conversation about enterprise cloud computing involves considerations about infrastructure,more specifically who controls it and how it is implemented. By offering engagement with applications and services, rather than just raw resources, PaaS may ultimately be the best way forward for many enterprises seeking to set up new services and partnerships through the cloud.
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