Data Runs the World
Data is like air. It’s all around you, invisible, elusive, and yet, essential to the survival of every company on the face of the planet today. When your data management’s on point, your people are free. Free to innovate. Free to breathe. Free to chase down the technology of tomorrow, bottle it up, harness it, or do whatever the hell you want them to do with it. The point is you need data, and you need control over it.
Flashback with us for a moment … back to when, in the primordial mists of the early 2000s, cloud storage entered the chat. You know … “The Cloud”? While the concept seems common now, nothing was ever the same after that. Cloud storage birthed more of today’s technology landscape than we have space to explore in a single blog post. Truth be told, a series of blog posts couldn’t adequately explain the impact of cloud storage on 21st-century life.
These days, cloud storage is pervasive and expected, yet it’s in a constant state of evolution. And for enterprise cloud storage, this requires a unique paradox of indefatigable stability and relentless innovation. For example, bleeding edge cloud storage providers understand that their enterprise clients expect absolutely intuitive, complex user management capabilities, and yet they also want tomorrow’s hottest third-party integration to be available instantly with seamless workflows into their tech stack.
Cloud storage might seem like an archaic topic when everyone’s talking about AI and machine learning, but this is truly what feeds the beast. Without reliable, dynamic, lightning-fast access to the right data at the right moment, nothing else in your tech stack matters. In fact, enterprise cloud storage achieves things local storage could never dream of doing — multi-user versioning with inline editing, instant scalability and elastic capacity, multi-third-party integration, and one-touch access from anywhere. In the WFH era, these aren’t negotiables; they’re what separate winners and losers.
So, let’s get into the nuts and bolts of what defines the very best in enterprise cloud storage and unpack how you select the right solution for your team.
Enterprise Cloud Storage Unpacked
Everyone knows the concept of GIGO – garbage in, garbage out. But today’s enterprise cloud data solutions make GIGO look like “goo goo ga ga” by comparison. First of all, there are countless ways to leverage cloud computing in enterprise systems. You can purchase bulk space from a public cloud. You can create hybrid clouds. You can launch your own cloud — if you’re rich and crazy enough. Or, you can leverage a cloud gateway vendor. Regardless of how you solve it, your use cases will likely include:
- Primary storage of application data
- Content distribution
- Backup and disaster recovery
- Archival storage
- Alternative to costly physical infrastructure upgrades
With those general parameters in mind, let’s examine the top enterprise cloud storage solutions available today:
- Public Cloud: Like public housing, public cloud space is affordable and ubiquitous. It’s always going to have high regulatory compliance, and the cost-benefit ratio of low pricing with frequent infrastructure improvements is strong. This is a reliable and predictable option for typical enterprise cloud storage solutions.
- Private Cloud: If you’ve got the resources to build your own cloud, good for you! You can build a fortress of solitude and maintain complete control over every update, every expansion, every regulatory log. You’re the master of your domain. And, you’re probably paying out the nose for the exclusivity of it all.
- Hybrid Cloud: For many enterprise cloud storage providers, there’s a golden ratio of public infrastructure and private administration. You gain efficiency and scalability from fractionalized resources without incurring the full cost of ownership. And yet, you retain better control over how your data is managed, from edit and access rights to local cache allocation and enhanced encryption capabilities.
Whatever your priorities, you can make a business case for any model of enterprise cloud storage. Just realize that it’s not as simple as price–per-GB. Value-added features trump storage capacity in today’s enterprise cloud storage market.
Ask yourself a few questions: “Does this enterprise cloud storage solution …”
- Improve our resource availability and utilization rates?
- Lower our CAPEX and OPEX across our tech stack?
- Enhance our disaster mitigation/recovery capabilities?
- Empower a culture of innovation?
- Ensure rock-solid security for every byte of data?
Do more faster with less.
Your enterprise cloud storage solution should equip your team to work smarter, not harder. Uniting disparate departments and teams across one globally-accessible data set optimizes your performance capabilities. Resource availability increases. Insights multiply. Security intensifies. Innovation thrives.
Thrive outside the boundaries of cost-based planning.
When every opportunity hangs on questions of CAPEX or OPEX impact, innovation dies a slow and painful death. Reduce friction in your organization by removing the limits to your enterprise’s imagination. When everyone has access to the same data from everywhere at the same time, and that capacity is instantly scalable on-demand, your enterprise cloud storage solution becomes an infinite playground for brilliant minds.
Stop guessing at your exposure and lock it down.
Enterprise cloud storage solutions are the foundation of regulatory compliance in the digital age, from user management to analytics that supply answers to questions that matter. And, with immutable data protection and military-grade encryption as routine capabilities for some providers, enterprise cloud storage security far surpasses expectations.
Device-agnostic performance delivers results.
In a bring-your-own-device enterprise environment, data access must be seamless across devices and locations. Anything less sacrifices productivity and performance. Your enterprise cloud storage solution should optimize your data availability with full integration onto every phone, tablet, laptop, or other edge device necessary for empowering maximized outcomes.
Anticipate inherent downsides to mitigate downtime.
Cloud storage requires an internet connection. Duh. So, for many enterprise cloud storage providers, this is an inherent weakness. No internet, no data, no productivity. Almost as problematic as no internet is slow internet. With the hybrid workforce scattered across home offices, coffee shops, and other third spaces, bandwidth can fluctuate wildly. Intelligent enterprise cloud storage solutions will leverage locally cached files, incremental backups, and cloud mirroring to create fail-safes and behind-the-scenes efficiencies that mitigate these realities of the post-pandemic workplace.
Enterprise Cloud Storage Solved
There are individual tools that excel at each part of the enterprise cloud storage solution ecosystem — findability, auditing, file recovery, visibility, etc. But, cobbled together, they never deliver a complete view of all relevant data locations or add significant management complexity.
You want a platform that holistically solves the entire data ecosystem. One that overachieves in every category while providing seamless management workflows and rock-solid cybersecurity. You want a unicorn made up of two parts reliability, one part scalability, and every part cybersecurity.
How do you find it? Put all the competitors in the ring, and challenge them.
- How is file redundancy managed? They should be able to empower remote collaboration in real-time through intelligent read-write controls that ensure file versioning is a thing of the past.
- How is data recovery executed? It should be instant, automated, and unintrusive — like the problem never happened in the first place. And, it shouldn’t involve a caveat about “accidents happen!”
- How is security reinforced against ransomware? The only answer should be that ransomware is old news because they’ve eliminated it from your vocabulary with sophisticated isolation and restoration algorithms that defeat it for good.
- How are user provisioning and app integration managed? If the answer requires an advanced degree in computer science, they’re not the one for you. Seamless, intuitive, and fully integrated is what you want.
The Future of Enterprise Data Management Starts Here
Ultimately, the best enterprise cloud storage platforms are going to move beyond merely providing remote server infrastructure to host data. They’re going to equip you with powerful data management capabilities that enhance your security, optimize your productivity, and empower your innovation. It’s not enough to just collect and protect data. Now, it’s about what you do with that data.
How will you change the future of transportation?
How will you eradicate diseases once thought impossible to defeat?
How will you educate, entertain, and enlighten an entire generation of people through personalized content delivery?
You can’t solve BIG problems if you don’t have BIG data at your fingertips, fully searchable, fully integrated, and fully protected.
With the right partner, the future is yours. With bat365, anything is possible.