Sponsored by: EMC Mozy. Liz Conner Laura DuBois – May 2013
IN THIS WHITE PAPER
Cloud services are having a transformational effect on IT organizations today. They are changing not only how IT is architected, procured, and deployed but also from whom and how IT infrastructure is provided. Storage is one industry seeing major disruption as consumers and businesses alike procure storage capacity and functions from public cloud service providers. However, paramount to a sustainable and successful deployment of a public cloud storage service is extensive due diligence on the cloud provider offering the service. This paper identifies the key criteria that firms should use in evaluating a cloud service provider business that is built to last. It also identifies how Mozy by EMC Corporation addresses these requirements, empowering over 100,000 business customers and millions of individuals to rely on the Mozy cloud for protection and recovery of their data.
SITUATION OVERVIEW
The Growth of Cloud and Its Impact
Cloud services, along with mobility, big data/analytics, and social media, are one of the four leading transformational technologies enabling new business and IT strategies. Cloud services have changed the manner in which some applications are developed and how major portions of IT infrastructure are purchased, managed, and deployed. They allow companies to outsource select portions of their compute, storage, and/or data needs, resulting in capital and operating cost savings for strained IT budgets. Cloud services allow organizations to purchase just what they need while benefiting from more easily upgraded services and eliminating the need to overprovision hardware in anticipation of future growth. The maintenance of IT infrastructure cannot be overlooked either. The ongoing monitoring, troubleshooting, and management of infrastructure and applications can be offloaded from internal operations teams to a cloud provider.
As cloud computing continues to grow, the storage component is leading the way. Consistently, going back to 2006 when IDC first initiated its cloud research, storage has been one of the leading use cases for public cloud. According to IDC’s 2012 CloudTrack Survey of 493 IT professionals, behind email, backup/archive was the number 2 workload most likely to migrate to the public cloud. Why is this? For organizations seeking quick deployment of increased storage or enhanced desktop/laptop backup, within the limits of established operating budgets (opex), public cloud storage services offer relatively hassle-free, off-premise, pay-as-you-grow storage.
