Hybrid Cloud Gets A Grip On The Key Challenges Of Cloud Data Storage

Hitherto, cloud-based data storage has been popularly known for the unparalleled flexibility and capacity-on-demand benefits that it offers to the users. However, cloud storage has also given rise to some of compelling challenges that have actually restricted its adoption to some extent. These issues basically revolve around latency as well as the security and reliability of data transmission that majorly ascend when storage resources are located remotely.

Therefore, hybrid cloud solutions for storage have emerged, seeking to get its grip completely on these issues simply by placing some portion of storage resources locally and carrying out trustworthy and secure data transmission to the cloud.

Through this post, I would like to highlight how hybrid cloud been successful in addressing the major concerns related to online data storage.

Undoubtedly, cloud computing has different flavors, each one of which is primarily aiming to align with varying business modules. Hybrid cloud computing solutions leverage both public and private cloud models.

What is Hybrid cloud storage?

Hybrid cloud storage is a technique of integrating storage provision that makes use of both local and cloud-based storage resources. It fundamentally consists of an appliance provided by the service provider in tandem with a connection to remote storage resources. The integration appears to the user as a single entity offering disk storage. The appliance is either provided as physical hardware or as a virtual machine, and hybrid cloud storage integration offers both file and block protocols.

Let’s have a detailed discussion on how hybrid cloud solutions can assist in resolving some of the key challenges associated with cloud-based data storage provision:

Latency– Hybrid cloud solutions overcome latency issues simply by caching data locally and making use of WAN optimization techniques to manage sudden influx of data traffic. In case of read requests, this often means use of a least recently used (LRU), algorithm, where the most lately accessed data is stored temporarily in cache and is replaced with fresher data with time. While for write requests, the appliance may select to data storage location, and then write in bursts to increase traffic flow.
Security– A hybrid cloud storage provision offers security at different levels. Firstly, it offers highly secure access to the cloud storage service provider, based on the mechanism they incorporate for authentication. Secondly, it encrypts data while on move all across the network (by means of protocols, like SSL and TLS). Thirdly, it also encrypts the data while at rest within the cloud service provider’s data storage environment.
Reliability– Basically, appliances provide customary protocol provision within the client data center, such as NAS protocols (CIFS and NFS) and block protocols (iSCSI). However, these are challenging or near to impossible to utilize data to/from the cloud. Hence, appliances transform local protocol instructions to web-based APIs, including Representational State Transfer (REST), which make use of streamlined I/O commands that carry out read, write and delete function on data stored as objects. Furthermore, data integrity is retained by storing metadata comprising write time stamps with the content itself. The time stamps enable data to be reassembled in the right order in the event of any unexpected failure.

Hence, embrace the new emerging technology, that is, hybrid cloud hosting storage and keep your highly critical data save.