Cloud storage allows us to store data remotely and access it from any device through the internet. This way, it increases productivity and efficiency. You can also backup data safely through a cloud way. It leverages plenty of benefits for businesses as they use a large amount of data that they can store using cloud storage and pay only for what they use. Besides, cloud storage makes collaboration and data sharing easier without over-investing.

Cloud storage is a brilliant medium for file sharing too. As most cloud storage providers look similar in terms of their services, it isn’t very clear to decide which one to select for your purpose. Here are some tips that may be helpful in this context – you must look for services that would include –

• Collaboration
• Security. In case the service provider does not provide end-to-end encryption, they need to encrypt the data and transfer it to the cloud.
• Usability
• Support provided by the providers
• What platform are you using, like Windows, Mac, iPhones, Androids, BlackBerry, etc.

However, like all new innovations, the pros and cons of cloud storage are also debatable with great enthusiasm. Let’s analyze the pros and cons of cloud storage.

Related post – How Cloud Storage works

Pros of Cloud Storage

The pros of cloud storage are inevitable with the advantages of cloud: scalability, weightage of offsite management, easy and fast deployment, lower upfront costs, etc. Additionally, with cloud storage, you will get limitless capacity.

Now, let’s discuss the advantages one by one.

Offsite Management

With cloud storage, you are privileged with offsite management. Your data is managed online. No physical maintaining of data frees you up for other priorities. Furthermore, if you have a strong relationship with the cloud vendor, they even handle the logical aspects such as data protection, backups, and other aspects of data management. Also, you can offload physical on-site storage management tasks like configuration to the cloud and acquisition set up with cloud storage.

Connectivity

One of the strong aspects of the cloud is connectivity that enables users to freely share and access data at any point in time and from any location and device. This enhances operational efficiencies, time-to-market, and business agility at a decreased cost.

Speed

When supported by the right enterprise technologies, the speed achieved by the cloud can cross the on-site scores. Not only that, you gain an increased data transfer rate.

Scalability

Scalability is another area where the public cloud rules. The various providers have done a good job in making vast amounts of storage capacity available on tap.

Lower Upfront Cost

When you need to evaluate, purchase, build, provision, and manage storage. With public cloud storage, all these take off your hands. Often businesses with peak periods end up buying enough storage and performance to satisfy peak demand, yet 95 percent of the time, that amount of storage and IO simply isn’t needed.

Disaster Recovery (DR)

With cloud storage, the overall disaster recovery process becomes hassle-free. Since you can save your data miles away from your physical location, it reduces the risk of loss during any system failure and is backed up safely. Cloud providers automate the backup process for you. Therefore there is no need to back up your data on an external device yourself. You save time and stress as a result.

Access your data anywhere

In cloud storage, your data is stored remotely so that you can access it online from any location all over the world. Besides, cloud storage helps in promoting collaborative processes. Your employees, in this case, are capable of working work from home or abroad.

Cons of Cloud Storage

The main concern about data stored in cloud storage is compliance. Besides, there are overall lifetime costs, security concerns, and speed issues. So, if a company’s data is extremely critical and related to its existence, then it must not be stored only in the cloud. 

Lifetime Costs

New implementation of cloud incurs a hefty upfront cost. The convenience of one low monthly lease payment looks great at the beginning. But when the lease is up, and you owe a lot of cloud storage usage and then have to pay an exorbitant amount. As a result, the lifetime costs hit home. Will it really be cheaper than on-premise once you tally up the costs over three, four, or five years? For some, the answer will be no.

Security

Data in the public cloud poses security and privacy concerns. There are data breaches across almost every public cloud service that continue to be regularly reported by the media. So, it is not wise to store anything sensitive in the public cloud.

Additional concern areas of public cloud security worry are such as managing permissions (both internal and external), vendors accessing your files for marketing and encryption purposes, the confidentiality of intellectual property, transfers when on WiFi, synchronization (which document is accurate and are any incorrectly overwritten?), multiple public cloud providers, accidental deletion on shared drives and lack of clear-cut audit trails.

Speed

Bandwidth and data speeds are other concerning points of the public cloud. Though cloud storage, in general, has achieved a benchmark, still the main barrier to public cloud storage is the time to take file transfers.

Compliance

In some heavily regulated industries, it is just too unworkable to use the public cloud. Healthcare, financial services, and publicly traded companies have to tread very carefully if considering the public cloud. Because it can become a bigger issue if numerous jurisdictions or a third party posse the cloud storage data.

Lack of total control

Since your cloud storage is at offsite, you do not control it. As a result, you lack the ability to control and customize your data storage setup. This is likely to be an issue for larger businesses that have complex storage needs. This typically requires a level of customization that cloud data storage companies are unfortunately unable to accommodate.

Difficult to migrate

Once you’ve signed up and started using one particular cloud storage provider, it is difficult to migrate data to another cloud provider later.

This is a phenomenon known as ‘vendor lock-in.’ Vendor lock-in is particularly a problem for medium-to-large size businesses that store massive amounts of data with one cloud provider. If you run into problems with that provider, it may be problematic to switch to another provider due to the sheer size of data and related complexities of making a move.

No way without the Internet

If your Internet connection fails, you will lose access to remotely stored data. Internet failure thus leads to costly downtime when your business heavily relies on cloud storage. Furthermore, if your Internet connection is slow, you will need to wait a long time in order to access your remotely stored data.

Conclusion

So, if you compare the pros and cons of cloud storage, the benefits of cloud storage outweigh the potential cons. To conclude, cloud storage is certainly here to stay and something that most businesses should consider for using.