A cloud storage service is a business that maintains and manages its customers' data and makes that data accessible over a network, usually the internet.
Most of these types of services are based on a utility storage model. They tend to offer flexible, pay-as-you-go pricing and scalability. Cloud storage providers also provide for unlimited growth and the ability to increase and decrease storage capacity on demand.
Leading uses for a cloud storage service include backup, disaster recovery (DR), collaboration and file sharing, archiving, primary data storage and near-line storage.
Advantages of private cloud storage include high reliability and security. But this approach to cloud storage provides limited scalability and requires on-site resources and maintenance.
Public cloud storage offers high scalability and a pay-as-you-go model with no need for an on-premises storage infrastructure. However, performance and security measures can vary by service provider. In addition, reliability depends on service provider availability and internet connectivity.
Hybrid cloud storage offers the best of the private and public cloud with high scalability and on-premises integration that adds more layers of security. The result is better performance and reliability because active content is cached locally. While a hybrid cloud tends to be more costly than public storage, it is cheaper than private cloud storage. Reliability can be an issue, as users must depend on service provider availability and internet connectivity.
Select storage type with care. Choose a storage service that delivers the amount of performance and resilience most suitable for your workload at the least possible cost.
Gauge availability and performance. Metrics enable users to monitor and measure when a public cloud storage service performs as it should or has issues. Having access to these metrics eases troubleshooting and facilitates improvements to architectures and workload designs.
Adapt to the behaviors of the cloud storage service. The way a cloud storage provider stores and provides access to data cannot be changed by customers to address unexpected variations in performance because they share the infrastructure with many other organizations.
Clients do have the ability to redesign the architecture of their workloads by duplicating storage resources in more than one public cloud region, for example. This way, cloud storage customers can redirect storage resources to the replicated region should problems arise. Caching can also address -- and head off -- potential cloud storage service performance issues.