Category Archives: Cloud Storage

Sunday Deals: Save 89% on the Polar Backup Cloud Storage – Geeky Gadgets

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Sunday Deals: Save 89% on the Polar Backup Cloud Storage - Geeky Gadgets

10 Most Interesting Announcements From Kubecon + CloudNativeCon 2019 – Forbes

San Diego became the host for one of the largest industry events of the year - KubeCon + CloudNativeCon. With over 12000 attendees and 100s of vendors from the cloud native ecosystem, this conference was undoubtedly the biggest gathering of the industry.

KubeCon

Cloud Native Computing Foundation is chartered with the governance of the open source projects that form the critical building blocks of modern infrastructure. The most notable project governed by CNCF is Kubernetes, which has become the foundation of modern infrastructure.

With over 20 projects, 500 members, and 100 companies, CNCF represents one of the most vibrant communities and ecosystems of the industry. Just in 2019, 205 new members joined the foundation doubling the count of the membership.

KubeCon witnessed a 50% increase in attendance compared to last years event in Seattle. From traditional infrastructure companies such as HPE and VMware to young startups, the event had the most interesting mix of vendors.

The event transformed into a major milestone for the cloud native community. Companies utilize KubeCon to announce new products and features.

This years KubeCon saw over 100 announcements coming out from the cloud native ecosystem. Here is an attempt to highlight some of the most interesting announcements from KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2019.

1. Helm 3 is Launched

Helm, an incubating project from CNCF, is the most popular application packaging tool for Kubernetes. It finds its place in the cloud native toolbox used by administrators as one of the key deployment tools. Microsoft, Google, CodeFresh and Bitnami are the key contributors of Helm.

The latest version of Helm simplifies and streamlines the experience by getting rid of some of the dependencies such as Tiller, a server-side component that ran within a Kubernetes cluster. There is also a well-defined migration path from Helm 2 to Helm 3.

2. AWS, Intuit and WeaveWorks Collaborate on Argo Flux

Argo Flux consolidates similar efforts from Intuit and WeaveWorks to deliver a unified continuous deployment tool based on Gitops. AWS is integrating the GitOps tooling based on Argo Flux in Elastic Kubernetes Service and Flagger for AWS App Mesh.

The collaboration resulted in a new project called GitOps Engine to simplify application deployment in Kubernetes.

3. Confidential Computing for Kubernetes from Microsoft

According to Microsoft, confidential computing capability provides an additional layer of protection from potentially malicious code. Based on Intel Software Guard Extensions (Intel SGX), this technology ensures that the data is protected even while the code is running on the CPU.

Microsoft is extending confidential computing to Kubernetes through a native workflow. Azure customers can launch clusters that support Intel SGX and then install confidential computing device plugin in the nodes. Kubernetes users can schedule pods and containers that use the Open Enclave SDK onto hardware which supports Trusted Execution Environments (TEE) based on Intel SGX.

4. Red Hat Launches CodeReady Workspaces 2.0

Announced in February 2019, CodeReady Workspaces from Red Hat provides a Kubernetes-native, browser-based development environment for smoother collaboration across multiple team members. Based on the open source Eclipse Che integrated development environment (IDE) project, CodeReady Workspaces is optimized for Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

The latest release of CodeReady Workspaces enables developers to create and build applications and services in an environment that mirrors that of production environments running on Red Hat OpenShift.

CodeReady Workspaces streamlines the developer experience by integrating the IDE with the production deployment environments.

5. Mirantis Launches Kubernetes as a Service (KaaS)

Mirantis announced the continuously updated multi-cloud Kubernetes as a service (KaaS). The company calls the offering as a pure-play Kubernetes platform without proprietary API extensions which ensures that the apps can run on any cloud. Mirantis hardens the upstream Kubernetes software to make it scalable and reliable.

This announcement came after the recent news of Mirantis acquiring Dockers enterprise business.

6. OReilly Acquires Katacoda

Katacoda is an extremely popular tool to simulate Linux-based environments for learning new tools and platforms. The best thing about Katacoda is that the users can learn in real environments with the actual tools they would deal in production environments, within their web browser.

OReilly has successfully transformed itself into an online learning platform. Katacoda acquisition enables OReilly users to extend their learning experience to environments that mimic the real-world configuration.

7. Portworx Launches PX-Autopilot

Portworx, the leader in container attached storage market, announced an interesting extension to their storage platform called PX-Autopilot. The tool automatically provisions more storage when it detects that an application deployed on Kubernetes is running low on storage capacity.

PX-Autopilot is a based on policy engine that automatically adds block storage volumes or resizes existing application volumes when consumption hits a specific pre-defined threshold. Think of it as an autoscale engine for cloud native storage.

8. Diamanti Announces Spektra Hybrid Cloud Solution

Hyper-converged infrastructure company, Diamanti, announced Spektra, a hybrid cloud platform to manage the lifecycle of containerized workloads running across on-premises and public clouds. It also supports moving applications and data between various Kubernetes clusters.

Spektra provides a single pane of glass to manage the storage capabilities of clusters registered with the engine which enables mobility of applications and data between multiple Kubernetes environments with minimal impact.

9. Buoyant Announces Dive, a SaaS Control Plane for Kubernetes

Buoyant, the creators of Linkerd, announced the private beta of Dive, a multi-tenant control plane to manage Kubernetes deployments.

According to Buoyant, Dive turns every change to the infrastructure into a permalink - which can be pasted into Slack, commented on, and tied to other changes. Every service gets a homepage - which can be augmented with SLOs, runbooks, and ownership information.

Dive extends Linkerds ability to manage microservices running in a Kubernetes cluster.

10. Rancher Extends Kubernetes to the Edge

Rancher, the company that created the vendor-agnostic and cloud-agnostic Kubernetes management platform, announced the general availability of K3s, a lightweight, certified Kubernetes distribution purpose-built for small footprint workloads.

Rancher partnered with ARM to build a highly optimized version of Kubernetes for the edge. It is packaged as a single binary with a small footprint which reduces the dependencies and steps needed to install and run Kubernetes in resource-constrained environments such as IoT and edge devices.

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10 Most Interesting Announcements From Kubecon + CloudNativeCon 2019 - Forbes

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian’s 9 Boldest Statements At Next ’19 UK – CRN: The Biggest Tech News For Partners And The IT Channel

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian tipped his hat to Googlers and partners for innovations helping fuel the cloud computing providers drive to woo enterprise customers at the sold-out Next 19 UK conference in London today.

Companies including Irving, Texas-based healthcare giant McKesson, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles and London retailer John Lewis Partnership provided customer testimonials on how Google Cloud is helping to transform their businesses.

Kurian and his colleagues at the Mountain View, Calif.-based technology giant unveiled new products and services including security offerings, Explainable AI (artificial intelligence), Bare Metal Solution, which consists of all the infrastructure that customers need to run specialized workloads such as Oracle Database close to Google Cloud, and Smart Compose for Google Docs.

You are going to be excited to know that thousands of Googlers are working hard every day to give you this platform to help you innovate, Kurian said. We give you this platform to paint a new vision for your company -- to imagine what was once considered impossible, and to transform the way you serve customers in every industry. We're investing very aggressively to ensure that you have the right sales resources, customer service resources, as well as product innovations, to take your organization into the future.

Here's an edited look at what Kurian shared with Next 19 UK attendees at ExCeL London, in his own words.

Google Clouds Mission

Our mission at Google Cloud is to enable organizations around the world to transform their business using digital technology and to do so by offering the best infrastructure, a digital transformation platform and industry-specific solutions to help you transform your organization as well as to infuse you with our expertise and our culture to help you create that magic. We do so by offering you three important key components. First, Infrastructure as a Service. Second, our digital transformation platform and third, industry solutions. Our foundation is Infrastructure as a Service. We look at it as offering you six important capabilities: compute, storage, Network as a Service protected by new offerings that we're introducing today in the security area, deployable either in Google's cloud regions, or in your premise -- hybrid -- or increasingly out in the telecommunications network -- the edge. The foundation of all of this is our regions. We're live in 20 regions around the world and 61 availability zones. Six of those are here in Europe, and we'reintroducing five new regions (under previously announced plans to open data centers in Las Vegas, Salt Lake City, Warsaw, Jakarta and Seoul). This is part of a much longer strategy to roll out many more regions in different parts of the world to bring you our infrastructure so that you can use it effectively.

Googles Renewable Energy Commitment

Our regions are not only very powerful and capable, but also built on a foundation that advances renewables energy. Our CEO, Sundar Pichai, recently announced that Google has been a carbon-neutral company since 2007. When you move workload to our cloud, you're moving workload onto a backbone that is built by the largest corporate renewable energy company in the world: Google. So not only are you moving workloads to an amazing platform, but you're also doing good for the planet.

What Google Is Doing For European Customers

Let's start by understanding what we're doing for European customers, in particular. Recognizing that as cloud becomes a more central piece of IT infrastructure around the world, we're introducing a number of commitments. (They allow) you, first of all, to store your data in Europe -- not just the primary copy, but any secondary backups and all copies of data. You manage your own encryption key. You can keep that key of sight from Google itself. And with a new product we're announcing here at Cloud Next, you can deny Google the ability to decrypt your data for any reason. You have sole control of where your data sits, how it's encrypted and who has access to it. In addition, you can also require Google to ask you approval before any operators access your data. For instance, if you want us to help debug something or help clean up your data for you, you can require us to ask you permission before anybody does anything. And when you grant us permission to do so, we give you an audit record of every operation our operators are conducting, so you can see exactly what they're doing and why. And finally, you can also constrain us to ensure that users and administrators supporting your systems are only doing so from within Europe. So we're giving...European customers a cloud that helps you control where your data sits, who accesses is it, who operates it, and it's designed to meet the strictest regulatory requirements here in Europe. The reason we're doing this is that customers are moving more and more mission-critical workloads to our infrastructure.

Google Clouds Acquisition Of CloudSimple

We're announcing today a number of new offerings in compute, new compute VMs (virtual machines) optimized in both AMD and Intel processors, faster storage offerings and two really great network offerings -- network intelligence that lets you look at global traffic patterns on the network accessing your systems, and packet mirroring that will allow you to get better reliability in the infrastructure. They're all part of our commitment to give you a secure, reliable, high-performance infrastructure to run both our application workloads as well as partner applications. If you're running VMware on your premise, we're announcing today a new offering to allow you to move VMware workloads to the cloud. You can migrate your VMware workload as is to the cloud. You can use your existing VMware tools, processes and operational practices to run these workloads in the cloud. Not only does it allow you to migrate applications unchanged, you can also do so while maintaining business continuity. And we're doing this through an acquisition we announced earlier this week by acquiring CloudSimple. CloudSimple is now part of Google Cloud. They're recognized worldwide as experts in running VMware, and they have proven technology to let you move VMware workloads to our cloud.

New Cloud Acceleration Program

Many companies run SAP applications in our cloud, because it lets you upgrade your SAP systems without downtime. You can run them with excellent performance. You can patch your systems and maintain business continuity without taking any downtime, and you can improve the information that you get from SAP by using Google's analytic tools and our machine learning technology. We're introducing a new programcalled the SAP Cloud Acceleration Program. It's a program we're announcing with a variety of partners -- Atos, Accenture, Deloitte and several others -- to move workloads to the cloud at an extraordinarily attractive price, to run them in our cloud at an extraordinary attractive price, and with new support offerings, including (SAP) MaxAttention, to ensure you get the best reliability in running a mission-critical workload like SAP.

NetApp Cloud Volumes Service

Another workload that we're announcing a solution for today is NetApp. NetApp offers a new service: the Cloud Volumes Service for Google Cloud Platform. We're announcing general availability, including right here in London. So if you run NetApp storage on your premise, Cloud Volumes is a full hybrid cloud storage solution. You can move data from NetApp storage on your premise to our cloud. You can migrate applications that run on NetApp without any change to the cloud. You can run them in production, and you can do so while maintaining business continuity.

Atos Workplace As A Service

We're announcing today a new bare metal offering (Bare Metal Solution) to run raw servers running SAP, VMware and Oracle, for instance. You can migrate existing enterprise licenses to the cloud, and you get great performance and scalability. This is a new offering we're introducing in partnership with Atos. They're also offering a broad set of services, including Database as a Service, a new offering called Workplace as a Service (Google Edition, inclusive of G Suite and Chromebooks)...and running SAP, as well as doing data center exits.

Explainable AI

There are people who use our data management infrastructure for AI and machine learning. We offer four important capabilities: a platform, AI building blocks, an AI Hub, which provides one-click deployment of models, and AutoML, (which) makes it much easier for people to build AI models. To make it even easier for customers to adopt AI, we're introducing a variety of solutions -- horizontal solutions like Contact Center AI and Document AI, as well as industry-specific solutions based on Google's AI expertise. One of the important things we're announcing here at Cloud Next is a solution called Explainable AI. Explainable AI allows you, a customer, who is using AI in an enterprise context or an enterprise business process, to understand why the AI infrastructure generated a particular outcome. So for instance, if you're using AI for credit scoring, you want to be able to understand why didn't the model reject a particular credit application and accept another one. Explainable AI provides you the ability to understand that.

Smart Compose For Google Docs

G Suite is used by many people around the world for collaboration. People love this concept called Smart Compose in Gmail, where, (using Google AI), the system suggests a reply for you and makes it much easier for you to compose email. We're now bringing Smart Compose to Google Docs to make you more productive when you're writing documents and collaborating with one another. We've also integrated all the elements of our collaboration tools into a single workspace. Because of these advances today, 5 million companies pay to use G Suite, and we have over a billion people using our Drive and 1.5 billion people every day using Gmail. You could be one of them.

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Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian's 9 Boldest Statements At Next '19 UK - CRN: The Biggest Tech News For Partners And The IT Channel

Why Has Western Digitals Hard Drive Revenue Dropped 35% Over The Past 5 Years, Despite 50% Growth In Exabytes Shipped? – Forbes

KIEV, UKRAINE - 2018/12/18: In this photo illustration, the Western Digital Computer company logo ... [+] seen displayed on a smartphone. (Photo Illustration by Igor Golovniov/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Western Digital (NASDAQ: WDC) has seen a steady growth in number of hard disk exabytes sold over the past 5 years, rising from 249 EB in 2015 to 383 EB in 2019, a growth of over 50%. (1 exabyte = 1 million terabytes)

Over the same period, Western Digitals hard disk drive revenue has dropped from $13.65 billion to $8.75 billion, a drop of over 35%.

You can view our interactive dashboard- A Look At The Trend In Western Digitals Exabytes Shipped And How It Has Affected Revenues to find out more about what drove the inverse correlation between exabytes shipped and revenues.

Why did this happen?

wdc

What does this mean?

Whats behind Trefis? See How Its Powering New Collaboration and What-Ifs ForCFOs and Finance Teams|Product, R&D, and Marketing Teams More Trefis Data Like our charts? Exploreexample interactive dashboardsand create your own

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Why Has Western Digitals Hard Drive Revenue Dropped 35% Over The Past 5 Years, Despite 50% Growth In Exabytes Shipped? - Forbes

20 Minutes With Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian At Next ’19 UK – CRN: The Biggest Tech News For Partners And The IT Channel

Google Cloud is helping small and medium-sized channel partners through a new value-added distributor program, incentives for landing accounts and by helping protect their territories, CEO Thomas Kurian told CRN.

In a particular region, we don't have thousands of partners who start competing with one another, Kurian said during an intimate media round table at Google Clouds Next 19 UK conference in London. We have been very careful how many partners we admit to the program, so that they get some time to ramp up.

In addition to partner program changes, Kurian shared his insights on Google Clouds enterprise push with new industry-specific solutions, specialized sales teams, economist-led value engineering teams, and pricing tied to successful outcomes. He also addressed European companies apprehensions about signing on with Google Cloud, facial recognition technology, remedying the cloud providers gaps in mainframe migration solutions and an expanded partnership with NetApp -- whose CEO is his twin brother -- that includes NetApp Cloud Volumes Service for Google Cloud, a fully managed file storage service integrated into Google Cloud to run enterprise and Windows applications.

Heres what else Kurian had to say at the ExCeL Center, with the River Thames as its backdrop.

A recurring conversation themeseems to be this increased push towards enterprise-readiness within Google. You can see that with some of the new hires that have been brought on board from other Silicon Valley enterprise giants. Can you give us some clues to the next...part of that ongoing enterprise push and where your priorities are in terms of bringing enterprises with Google Cloud?

A big shift that we've made this year is solutions. When we talk to a retailer about how can we help their business, it's not about just infrastructure. Many of them say, 'I'd like you to help me figure out how I can improve my supply chain efficiency.' With Vodafone, for examplewe're building their customer analytics platform. A lot of it starts with let's try to figure out first what problem you're trying to solve. In their case, it was we want to understand what customers are using what product, we want to understand how to upsell and cross-sell them new products. We want to understand what the churn rate is and turnover rate of our customers. That's a business conversation as opposed to a technology conversation. We've shifted a lot of our sales organization to be able to have that conversation with customers. We've specialized our sales teams, we've trained them on how to have that. We have a team of economists that run a team called value engineering, which goes and explains the business value outcome that we're measuring. We even have pricing associated with ensuring the successful outcome, rather than just pricing it by how many cores of compute it's likely to take. That's probably the biggest long-term change we're making to the organization. One example of something we've done to enable that, is we specialized our go-to-market organization around industry. So if you're a CIO (chief information officer) of a bank, you get someone who's only selling to banks and so understands the industry better as well.

What are for you, as a CEO, the hottest topics you have to deal with in the boardrooms with the customers you're talking to? What are their main reasons not to choose either Google or a cloud solution?

One of the biggest topics that have come up over the last few years here in Europe is the concern around, as an American company and as an American cloud provider, can European customers trust their data and systems on a cloud, particularly given some of the regulatory changes. So weve have to build a bunch of technologyto isolate data in Europe, secure it with European employees, ensure that even if you get regulatory requests from the government, that the customer has control over whether their data is given up. That is an extraordinarily common question that we get in Europe, particularly from regulated industries like financial services, communications and public sector agencies. So that was a difficult conversation, and it took us time, but we've built an engineering solution for people based on that. It is still a common question we get almost in all major, large European organizations...and we get that as a question about is cloud ready for me, because of the anxiety about moving data into a public cloud.

The Google platform (is) suddenly very popular with developers and people looking for innovation. In enterprise, you guys have been a bit behind, and it's something you're trying to change. Apart from the sales structure and the way you're going to market...could you elaborate a little bit on what the main reasons would be today for companies to pick your competitors over (Google Cloud)? What would you say are your main shortcomings that you would like to work away in the future in regards to the Google Cloud Platform?

A lot of enterprises have four or five workloads that dominate their IT (information technology) landscape, and one of the gaps we had earlier is we didn't have solutions for them. If you're running SAP, we have solutions now. If you're running VMware, we announced an acquisition and a solution for VMware (CloudSimple). If you're running a true legacy environment which cannot even run on a hypervisor, we offer bare metal to enable those. People have asked us do you run Windows properly? We do that now. There are tools that we offer for mainframe migration. A cloud-native company does not have a legacy, and so we used to largely sell to them. As we shifted into enterprise, we had to provide tools to migrate the existing estates that they had.

When you talk to smaller and midsize channel partners -- not the largest systems integrators -- what's the feedback you're getting from them on how you're doing and the restructuring of your sales organization and how they fit in?

We work with many smaller channel partners in SMB (small and medium-sized business) and in corporate customers. We have a very large SMB business. We have more than two to five million SMB customers, not just using G Suite, but also using Google Cloud Platform. Corporate segment for us is from hundred million to up to a billion in revenue. And there, too, because we don't have as many salespeople, we work very actively with partners. We have specialized our partner program for that segment of the market. To reach more smaller resellers and solution providers, we now have a VAD (value-added distributor) program, which is a two-tier distribution model. We did not have that before. We offer incentives now, which are different in the corporate segment and the enterprise segment, for example, to allow channel partners to land new accounts and also to expand an existing account where Google may have sold the initial deal, but we will give it to the partner. That is also new. Many small companies, they are great companies, but they don't have IT people in their organization, so they want a fully managed service, where they don't have to operate even the cloud. And so we have built a new managed service provider program for smaller companies. The feedback we've generally received is that they like the commercial incentives we're offering, and they're seeing fast growth in their business as we scale up the overall Google Cloud business. We've also been very careful to not expand the program too wide. In a particular region, we don't have thousands of partners who start competing with one another. We have been very careful how many partners we admit to the program, so that they get some time to ramp up.

This morning you announced a bare metal offer. Is answering licensing issues from your customers the main reason behind this announcement?

It is to solve three problems. The first is there are some true legacy workloads that ifyou have to migrate onto a virtualization stack, it won't run. If you have a very old version of Windows, or you have an extremely old version of Linux, telling them you can move it, but you have to upgrade, will cause real friction, because they have to upgrade the application and they have to re-test it. So the first one is for the true legacy. The second one is we have the largest virtual machines in the world configuration-wise. We support up to 12 terabytes of memory in a single virtual machine. But there arecustomers who run SAP HANA, which is their database, in configurations even larger than that --18, 24 terabytes. So to support very, very large environments, you do need a bare metals environment. The third reason is for cases where people are worried about licensing. Some true legacy products do not have a virtualized licensing model. You have to count the number of physical computers, and bare metal lets you count them much more easily.

Your rivals Amazon and Microsoft offer facial recognition tools to third-party businesses. Google Vision limits that to celebrity face-matching. Obviously, Google can do this. Is a move to offer a more powerful service to others imminent and. if not, why not?

So far, we have not offered it, because in some countries, it is not legally allowed. In some parts of the United States, for example, facial recognition is not allowed, because it is seen as a potential source of discrimination. It would be difficult in a cloud environment, where we offer a service that can be used anywhere in the world, for us to be able to do that and remain compliant with different countries' restrictions. If you are, for example, an American company operating, we don't want them to be able to say, 'Well, even though I'm not allowed to use facial recognition in the United States, I just access it in a Google data center in the UK. That would be a violation of the legal principle behind facial recognition prohibition in the United States.

You want to be known as the very secure organization, and that's mission-critical to the company. (You're) introducing tools to allow users to actually secure their sites on Google, so that you couldn't access them. It struck me that really ought to be the default...rather than having an option to actually take your encryption keys out.

By default today, if you use Google Cloud Storage, just as an example, you are encrypted by default. You manage the encryption key, we have no access to it. The biggest issue that people find when(its) is not enabled by default -- is maintaining the key off site from Google. Today we have a solution where you can encrypt the data, you manage the keys, but it's maintained in a repository in a Google data center...to which we do not have standing access. But it is maintained in a Google facility. And the reason we do that is many customers are worried about availability. Availability is if the connection from Google to the off-site location is dropped for whatever reason, because that's going through an internet service provider, we won't be able to look up the key until the connection comes back. What we don't enable by default, is just the off-site, key management. All the all the other functionality -- encryption by default, you manage your keys, no one has standing access -- is the default position.

What are your main topics and themes in product development for 2020?

A lot of what you'll see is extending our capabilities in the solution space in the industry domain -- retail, healthcare, financial services, manufacturing and media. Extending the core capabilities of our analytics -- the platform, application development, analytics -- as well as broadening our security footprint and then significantly expanding our infrastructure in terms of number of regions around the world.

Is it harder to differentiate yourself? AWS made a whole thing about a Nitro chip and how it enables them to do encryption without any impact on performance whatsoever, and they designed it themselves. I know you are quite able to develop hardware chips yourselves so, in the future, is that something you want to use to differentiate yourself?

We don't try to always develop hardware ourselves, but we do have places where we do our hardware and software. An example is hardware accelerators to perform specific functions. Specific functions could be...encryption, decryption algorithms, cryptographic algorithms...the network interface cards that optimize our software-defined network. Those are things that we have built for many, many years. So when new announcements come up, sometimes they are things we've already done. We build also this specific processor for AI called tensor processing unit, because we see that the number of AI cycles that people are consuming is growing, and we want to be more efficient in offering them cost-effective infrastructure for AI. But we work with all the other providers. We work with Nvidia, Intel, AMD, so we're not trying to compete as a hardware provider. Where we see a specific need that is not met, we'll implement something. But generally, we work with existing hardware providers, and we're not trying to compete with them in any way.

Google announced an expanded NetApp partnership yesterday. Is that something that originated with you and your brother, and do you talk about how you can expand that even further going forward?

We obviously have a good relationship with NetApp that preceded my joining Google. That project, Cloud Volumes, has been underway for over eight months, and it's part of the same theme of bringing enterprise workloads and data to the cloud. I mentioned VMware, Windows, mainframe, Oracle, SAP as all different kinds of workloads. Many companies run NetApp as their infrastructure in their data centers. And when they try to move workloads to the cloud, they say, 'Hey, I really want to run these workloads without having to retest everything.' Because the biggest issue when you migrate workload to the cloud, is risk and time. If you change the infrastructure substantially, you have to retest a lot of things. So with NetApp, we built this ability. You can take your existing storage, extract data from it or copy the data over, you can mount a set of NetApp Cloud Volumes to your compute. And because it exposes the exact same interface as on premise, you do not need to do as much retesting. You can validate and go live. It's a common requirement for customers, and that's why we want to offer it.

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20 Minutes With Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian At Next '19 UK - CRN: The Biggest Tech News For Partners And The IT Channel

Digital clutter’s messing with your mind here are 5 ways to ‘KonMari’ it – CNA

SINGAPORE: When one thinks about clutter, the first thing that comes to mind is physical mess. But we often do not think about the thousands of emails, photos and documents we hoard on our electronic devices and online.

This mountain of digital clutter can affect us in other ways, and even creates anxiety.

Dr Jessie Chua, a senior clinical psychologist with the Resilienz Clinic, compares digital clutter to physical clutter: Both can cause a similar amount of stress on ones mind.

It takes up that same amount of space that you can use for, say, creativity or for focus on work, she explained. It doesnt matter whether its visible or not visible; its still in the brain.

The brains frontal lobe sometimes needs space to help one think and plan. But when it becomes overwhelmed, it triggers another part of the brain called the amygdala.

This is the part of the brain that generates emotions the most dominant one is anxiety, she said.

When theres so much clutter, for example emails, this would continue to fire to a point where the body gets overwhelmed with anxiety.

Digital clutter not only affects an individuals well-being, but also constitutes a cybersecurity risk, as the programme Why It Matters discovers. (Watch the episode here.)

RUNNING OUT OF SPACE

A research paper presented last year said the emergence of digital devices like smartphones, engagement in social media networks and access to affordable digital storage has increased the propensity of an individual to acquire and store digital content without carefully considering its repercussions.

Globally, the digital data generated each day amounts to at least two to three exabytes (two to three billion gigabytes), according to Associate Professor Anupam Chattopadhyay from Nanyang Technological Universitys School of Computer Science and Engineering.

Were sending more than a few thousands of tweets every minute (and) uploading hundreds and thousands of photos on Instagram, he said.

At this rate, the world will run of storage space in future, he warned. I calculated this number to be 200 years at most.

CARBON FOOTPRINT

Data storage also places a burden on the environment. A significant amount of energy is used in running a data centre, including the cooling equipment to maintain the facilitys temperature.

It is estimated that by 2030, data centres in Singapore will account for up to 12 per cent of the countrys total energy demand, ST Telemedia Global Data Centres states on its website.

According to the Infocomm Media Development Authority, the 10 largest data centre operators in Singapore consume as much energy as 130,000 typical Housing and Development Board households.

Worldwide, data centres account for two per cent of greenhouse gas emissions today. That is the same carbon footprint as the aviation sectors 895 million tonnes of carbon dioxide. But the information technology sectors emissions are projected to exceed that.

PRIVACY RISKS

Having too many digital files also creates cybersecurity problems, given that many people store private documents and photos on their devices. The danger is that information can be compromised in a data breach.

Horangi Cyber Security chief executive officer Paul Hadjy said one must be cognisant when granting apps access to things like the camera roll on ones phone.

The best strategy is to update ones apps every so often and remove apps that one is not using.

Sometimes app companies go out of business, and if you keep those older apps over time, vulnerabilities get discovered, he explained. Those apps become more susceptible and allow access to things like your photos.

So here are five tips on organising and minimising digital clutter:

1. CATEGORISE AND DELETE

Decluttering queen Marie Kondo tidies up physical spaces like no other, and one of her KonMari consultants in training, Amanda Ling, suggested the Konmari method for digital clutter too: Put everything in a similar category into a single folder.

This could help one to realise how much data one has accumulated. From there, one can sort out the items to delete from the ones to keep the ones that spark joy.

For example, she suggested to Why It Matters host Joshua Lim that he delete the apps he does not use regularly, as his smartphone contained many apps, of which some were similar.

If you find that you really need (an app), then just re-download it. Its just a click away, she said.

Sometimes when you limit the choices a little bit, it can give you some clarity in deciding which is best for you.

One should review ones digital files and delete those that are no longer needed also to avoid being compromised by hackers, the Cyber Security Agency of Singapore (CSA) says on its website.

This includes files stored on devices as well as online and portable storage.

2. KEEP YOUR EMAIL INBOX CLEAN

Email accounts, too, can contain sensitive information such as reset passwords. So the CSA advises: Deleting emails that you no longer require would reduce the amount of information that would be compromised, even if your email accounts were hacked.

Beyond deleting emails, Ling suggested taking the time to also unsubscribe from emails that are of no value, since being bombarded with many emails, notifications and content each day can affect ones focus and productivity.

It really is about keeping track and being more intentional, she said.

People might think digital minimalism is too extreme. Its actually more extreme with the way were exposing ourselves, day to day, (to the consumption of digital content).

3. ARCHIVE OFTEN

Haw-San Au-Yong, a professional organiser with Edits Inc who helps to people declutter their physical and digital spaces, suggested taking the time to create folders and archive items.

Alerts can be set up with filters to go directly into a folder, instead of them cluttering up your inbox, so you can see the more important things that you need to take action on, she said.

Folders and archiving also make a difference to the number of things seen on ones desktop, as well as the number of electronic bookmarks.

4. SEND THEM TO THE CLOUD

To reduce the amount of digital baggage on ones devices, one can turn to cloud storage, such as Dropbox, OneDrive and Google Drive, advises the Government Technology Agency. But remember to categorise things properly in cloud storage too.

5. CLOSE UNNECESSARY ONLINE ACCOUNTS

Finally, delete online accounts that one no longer accesses, as well as the data stored in the account. And revoke any prior permissions granted to the company that provided the service, says the CSA.

This reduces the risk of information exposure if the company suffers a data breach. For the remaining accounts, it is advisable to review the privacy settings and permissions, especially if the service is accessing information it should not require.

Watch the episode here. Why It Matters is telecast every Monday at 9pm.

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Digital clutter's messing with your mind here are 5 ways to 'KonMari' it - CNA

Microsoft 365 Suffers Outage For Several Hours – CRN: The Biggest Tech News For Partners And The IT Channel

Microsoft reported that a networking update caused Microsoft 365 services to "intermittently fail" for some users Tuesday evening, Eastern Time.

As of 12:04 a.m., Wednesday, Microsoft said it had "confirmed restored access and functionality for all Microsoft 365 services."

[Related: The 10 Biggest Cloud Outages Of 2019 (So Far)]

Microsoft 365 includes Office 365 applications such as Outlook, Teams, Skype for Business, Exchange Online and Sharepoint Online.

The outage appears to have begun around 8 p.m., Eastern, based on reports on downdetector.com. The reported incidents peaked at about 8:18 p.m., around the time that Microsoft acknowledged in a tweet that it was "investigating an issue preventing access to Microsoft 365 services."

At 8:53 p.m., the company said in a tweet that "we've identified that multiple Microsoft 365 services are affected and we're actively looking for the swiftest means of restoring access."

An outage map on downdetector.com showed the Microsoft 365 outage affecting users in parts of the U.S., Canada, Asia and Australia.

The Microsoft 365 health status web page eventually indicated that a "recent networking update" had been responsible for the outage, GeekWire reported.

Microsoft opted to roll back the networking update to restore Microsoft 365 services. Just before 10 p.m., Microsoft tweeted that "we've identified and reverted a networking build that caused user traffic from the internet to Microsoft 365 services to intermittently fail, and are seeing early signs of recovery."

The outage was fully resolved just after midnight, Microsoft said.

In January, Microsoft saw two outages affecting some users of Office 365one of which Microsoft blamed on DNS provider CenturyLink, which acknowledged a software defect affecting connectivity to customers' cloud resources.

In May, several core Microsoft cloud services, including compute, storage, Active Directory and SQL database services, were impacted by a nearly three-hour DNS outage. Some of Microsoft's cloud-based applications, including Microsoft 365, Dynamics and Azure DevOps, were also impacted.

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Microsoft 365 Suffers Outage For Several Hours - CRN: The Biggest Tech News For Partners And The IT Channel

10 Best Free Cloud Storage Services in 2019 [Updated …

Cloud Computing is a revolution in the IT world that has changed the meaning of IT resources for businesses. In simple terms, cloud computing is related to the delivery of cloud computing services storage, compute, networking, database, and more over the internet. Cloud storage is what we have adopted intentionally or unintentionally; there is a buzz all around about the free cloud storage solutions.

The cloud storages have nowadays become a prized possession for very small and large business groups. The businesses try not to rely on hardware that is costly and thereby want to switch their data to the best free cloud storage available. But there are many businesses that have a very less knowledge of cloud storage and hence are surrounded by the blind beliefs of the traditional storage devices.

Preparing to become a certified cloud professional? Check our Cloud Certifications Training Courses now!

To benefit such businesses, we have compiled this blog to help them understand what is cloud storage and what are the best cloud storage options available for their businesses. Lets get started!

The traditional methods of storing data such as hard drives and pen drives or any other storage device have a lot of advantages associated. But once the storage device gets corrupted all the data stored gets lost. Hence the virtual cloud storage is a replica of the traditional storage devices where the users can store their data and keep their backup files on hardware and USB flash drives.

The IT sectors are always stressed out when its time for them to switch over to new software or technologies as this makes them hire more employees, but with the best free cloud storage available, the investment of the IT sectors has reduced comparatively. The best free cloud storage club members have introduced many free plans for businesses to ease their search for free storage.

There are a number of free cloud storage options available these days. These cloud storage are easy to use and provide free storage space up to50GB. These storage solutions can be used for personal as well as business storage. All you need is get some basic knowledge about these free cloud storage and choose the most suitable one. Here we bring the list of the best free cloud storage, lets dive deep to know more about these cloud storage solutions.

As we know all online storage works the same way i.e. we use a file, store on the web, and sync it in our computers. But there are many standing features of Google Drive that makes it special among all the other cloud storage because it lets the users store their personal stuff in a personal way and moreover the Google free cloud storage provides with an excellent free storage of 15GB and is one of the best cloud storage.

The Google Drive offline services help its users to view all the files and photos that are saved online even when they have a bad network service. Scanning documents have now become much easier by just taking a snap of the document and the rest is done by the drive like storing them in PDF form. Google free cloud storage is considered the best which is integrated with all other Google services.

Recommended Reading:Introduction to Cloud Computing

Media Fire is easy to use and one of the best free cloud storage used for storing documents and photos online. The initial free storage that media fire provides is 10GB but their incredible feature is that the free storage can be increased up to 50 GB. This cloud storage has many features which has made handling of files easier.

Media fire has made possible uploading multiple files at once from any browser which is a unique feature and makes it different from the others. Organizing files in the file manager of Media Fire have become easier. Searching for something that gives a perfect personal document features? The Media Fire is here to ease your search as it helps the users in sending documents with a specialized and free one time link which enables the recipients to share it further.

This is also one of the other best free cloud storage available. Syn.com provides a free storage of about 5GB. It has become quite easy to back up files with Sync.com only when the users have used something better than the sync folder because exploring the sync.com web panel which offers incredible features is productive. The best feature of the Sync.com is the restoring of deleted files and thereby stops users from regretting for mysteriously lost important documents.

Get free space feature is the most excellent feature that syn.com offers. If a user wants to get a bit more space for files and photos what is to be done is tell a friend about Sync and the number of friends signs up for sync gets a free gigabyte along with the user who recommends it to others. The Sync Vault is a feature which helps the users to save files and documents in a special storage space known as Vault which is different from the Sync folder and all that is required to be done just select a file and choose the option of Copy to Vault and your important data gets a backup.

The Mega cloud storage is a great storage space which is much similar to the dropbox storage but the difference between the two is the amount of the space that both the cloud storage provides. 50GB of free space is available for the Mega cloud storage users. Mega cloud storage helps users to download multiple files in the zip file and uploading files through the mobile app is also possible.

The unbeatable storage of 50GB has made it among one of the popular free cloud storage available and has attracted a large number of users towards Mega cloud storage. The users who are searching for an excellent backup file option should definitely sign up Mega cloud storage as it only provides with the best storage but also with the many security features.

Also Read: LatestCloud Computing Trendsin 2019

This is one of the powerful and latest free cloud storage compared to all other cloud storages because of its great back up features. Any type of small and large powerpoint presentations, photos, videos or maybe even other large CAD files can be safely kept in the Dropbox. Dropbox provides the users with easy sync features that help to access the files and documents to the Dropbox from any device.

Dropbox free storage provides users with many features that are extremely helpful. One of the helpful features is that a user can protect all the files and documents in a lost device by clearing the documents from the device with the remote wipe feature that it provides. Dropbox free storage offers a good storage space (2GB) that is free but in case of users are in need of more space, there are many plans that can help them to get the desired storage of their choice.

pCloud is one of the best free cloud storage options that provides 2TB storage and its unlimited remote upload traffic feature makes it unique. It offers 10GB of free storage space to its basic accounts. Resizing pictures on the go without the help of software has now become much easier with my.pCloud, which provides with a wide range of resizing options for its users.

The archive features the pCloud offers is amazing as files can be archived with the create archive option that it provides. The pCloud drive has an option that helps the users automatically lock the crypto folders each and every time they log off from the device.

Keeping documents and files within reach has become possible with the top free cloud storage solutions such as Microsoft OneDrive. Signing up with Microsoft can help users in keeping everything in one place. It earlier provided 15GB of free space to the users but has now reduced to 10GB. It can be accessed from any device at any point of time but is pre-installed in windows. This cloud storage is considered to be the second most wanted storage among businessman after the Dropbox storage cloud.

The main disadvantage of outlook was the user frustration of saving attachments from emails because of the number of steps that involved but it has now become easier for the businesses to choose email attachments and save it directly in folders. Now it has also become easier to create excel surveys and save it in OneDrive.

Must Read:Top 5 Cloud Computing Certifications

The Apple iCloud is the best free cloud storage for Apple users. Initially, it provides the users with 5GB of free storage. All documents and files can be stored safely and it is easy to use. The users of Apple iCloud can share photos and videos with ease with their family members. Organizing files and folders has become easy with Apple iCloud. Apple iCloud helps in sending messages and automatically and saves them. Even the users can start conversations from the exact point that they have stopped earlier.

The Next cloud is another best free cloud storage which helps in protecting data and has a lot of exciting features that attracts users. It provides an excellent backup feature which helps the users to keep track of all the data even after the device is lost. The Next Cloud provides a two-factor authentication to its users which in turn, provides an extra protection towards account usage.

This is another best free cloud storage available that helps the users in saving photos and files securely. This cloud storage has many features which have made handling of files easier. Maintaining a perfect workflow i.e. sharing of photos, videos, and documents have now become easier with the powerful features of Amazon Drive. It provides 24*7 support and 5GB of free storage after signing up.

Since it is all about getting the best free cloud storage, it is very important to understand the features that make the best cloud storage. There are many cloud storage providers that not only provide you the free cloud storage but also with many other features. Some cloud storages are there in the market that not only provides the best user experience and incredible features but helps users to enjoy the free services after the signup. But the other cloud storage that is mentioned above is also worth signing up as they all come up with unique features and free storage facilities.

The importance of cloud storage is increasing with the enhanced cloud growth and latestcloud computing trends. With the enhanced growth and the adoption of cloud by businesses and enterprises, the demand for cloud professionals is increasing. And there are even more opportunities for those having a cloud certification.

So, if you are planning to build a career in cloud computing or an aspired cloud professional looking for career growth, start preparing for the cloud certification. Whizlabs Cloud Certification Training Courses will help you in your journey of becoming a certified cloud professional. We are the pioneers among online certification training providers and have helped millions of professionals in getting their career one level up.

So, take a step ahead and join us to become a certified cloud professional.

Wish you the best for your certified cloud career!

Have any query/concern regarding cloud storage solutions? Just write below in the comment section or submit your query at Whizlabs Helpdesk, well respond to you in no time.

About Neeru JainTechnology Scientist by Mind and Passionate Writer by Heart!!With an enthusiasm for technological research and learning, Neeru turned out to be a technology expert. Her Belief: Words are powerful enough to change Mind, Life, and the World; only the writer should have a real passion for Writing!!

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10 Best Free Cloud Storage Services in 2019 [Updated ...

What is cloud storage? | IBM Cloud

Storage growth continues at a significant rate, driven by new workloads such as analytics, video and mobile applications. While storage demand is increasing, most IT organizations are under continued pressure to lower the cost of their IT infrastructure through the use of shared cloud computing resources.

It is vital for software designers and solution architects to match the specific requirements of their workloads to the appropriate storage solution or, in many enterprise cases, a mix. Enterprises adopting a hybrid cloud strategy may want to use a mix of on-premises dedicated storage with off-premises shared storage. Regardless of the combination, careful consideration of not only the location, deployment model (private, public or hybrid), scale, costs and a thorough understanding of the primary types of storage are important.

Block storage

Block storage continues to be the foundation for most enterprise applications. Block storage can come in a variety of forms with corresponding performance and availability attributes from host-direct attached storage (with its high IOPs and low latency for data intensive workloads) to virtualized block, with medium/low IOPs for more general-purpose or ephemeral workloads.

While the use of block storage by developers (via an operating system) is declining with the use of higher-level application platforms, the underlying storage is block.

File storage

File storage, also referred to as network-attached storage, has long been the mainstay for sharing files across users and application architectures. The very nature of file storage protocols such as NFS and CIFS makes the adoption of cloud-based storage easier than block. Yet there are higher network latency and throughput considerations, depending on the distance between your application and cloud storage provider. Cloud providers such as IBM offer file storage options that can be combined with traditional on-premises storage systems to build a hybrid storage solution.

Using a cloud storage gateway is one alternative to provide virtually endless storage to an existing on-premises application. Cloud storage gateways are devices (physical or software appliances) that reside locally in a data center and attach to cloud-based object storage. This can be an effective means to introduce a hybrid cloud storage solution without the need to significantly redesign an existing application.

Object storage

Many of the new born on the cloud applications are using object storage as their primary storage mechanism. Using simple HTTP REST-based APIs is the perfect developer-oriented storage solution, without file systems or other low-level operating system calls to contend with.

Object storage is not just for new applications but can be used to meet additional requirements for existing ones. It can also be used as an effective solution for backup and disaster recovery as a replacement for offsite, tape-based solutions, reducing the time to restore data.

The future of hybrid cloud storage is expanding as enterprises develop new applications and extend existing ones for public and private cloud solutions. In addition, the adoption of software-defined storage is evolving as enterprises increase the virtualization, automation and scalability of their storage environments. The key to adopting the right solution is to build a storage strategy that fits in ones cloud journey and match storage solutions with the requirements of the workload.

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What is cloud storage? | IBM Cloud

What Is Cloud Storage and What Are Its Advantages?

If you like being up to date with recent technology, you may have probably wondered what is cloud storage and what can it be used for? There is no easy way to describe this promising technology, as the definition constantly changes like the softwares profile.

In laymans terms, we could define cloud storage as a computing model where all the data is stored on secure or remote servers rather than on hard drives. The so-called cloud is actually an ensemble of servers that serve as hosts for the information they receive from all over the world.

In this article on what is cloud storage, we will attempt to address some of the most common questions regarding cloud storage.

Unlike traditional storage devices like hard drives or CDs, where information is stored in a physical format, all the data in the cloud is stored virtually on servers. Furthermore, you can access everything that is on the cloud from any computer thathas an internet connection.

The first major difference between cloud storage and traditional storage means is accessibility. While hard disks offer local access to information, cloud storage offers unlimited access to data, if the users can provide the necessary passkeys and if the computer has internetaccess.

Working with a cloud storage service has many advantages, as well as disadvantages. Probably the most obvious advantage that pops into mind is that you wont need to clutter up your hard drive with useless information. Furthermore, cloud storage services usually employ advanced information compression functions, which means greater indexing capability.

This, in turn, translates to faster search speeds. However, using a cloud storage service is not without disadvantages. Being a hosting entity, the cloud relies heavily on Internet connection speed.So, how does cloud storage work?

What Is Cloud Storage?

Cloud computing is an on-demand computing model which relies on a stable Internet connection to share and access data across multiple devices such as computers or smartphones.

If we took a step back to see the bigger picture, cloud computing allows users to access all the information stored in a third-party data center. This is achieved using minimal resources and minimal supervision.

Historically speaking, cloud computing, as a functional computer model, isnt that new. In fact, the so-called cloud goes all the way back to the 70s and 80s, when ARPANET and CNET, the predecessors of the modern Internet were already hinting at what cloud storage was going to become.

Best Cloud Storage Providers

Now, the most popular cloud storage services are arguably Dropbox, OneDrive and Google Drive. Each offers similar, but slightly different services, which makes it hard to assess which is the best cloud service. Dropbox offers 2GB free cloud storage, while OneDrive offers 5GB cloud storage for free in their Basic Plan. Google Drives cloud storage free plan offers 15GB. We reviewed the best cloud storage providers, so you can take a look at our assessments below:

The best cloud storage free plans are offered by MEGA (50 GB free cloud storage), pCloud (10 GB of free online storage), and MediaFire (10 GB cloud storage free). We reviewed all 3 providers, so you can find out more about their services from our reviews:

Other good free cloud storage providers areGoogle Drive (15GB for free), Box, (10GB free cloud storage), OneDrive (5GB free cloud storage), Amazon Drive (5GB and unlimited photos with Prime).

There are also other services which are very similar to cloud computing models:

Types of Cloud Storage

Now that weve briefly talked about what is cloud storage, lets take a closer look at the classification of cloud storage service. As the need for cloud-based solutions increased, so has the nature of the service become more complex.

Presently, we can discuss four major types of cloud storage services: private, public, hybrid and mobile cloud storage services.

Private clouds are tailored to accommodate and handle data requests from small home-based companies or larger companies. Typically, this type of cloud service is the best solution for a company that wants to migrate all data by employing the services of a third-party cloud provider.

Alternately, cloud service clients can opt for two types of private clouds. An on-premise cloud uses a server or a machine that can be found in the same building. This server hosts the cloud. The other option is externally-hosted cloud storage. The host server is not in the same building as the company.

On-premise private clouds are easier to supervise. The machine that handles all the requests is in the same building as the company. Thus, the staff can easily check if something goes wrong. However, keep in mind that this type of service is better suited for bigger companies. For smaller businesses, it may be a bit pricey, as the maintenance costs can be quite high.

With public cloud, you wont need to concern about maintenance or data security, since all the data is externalized. Public clouds are easier to access and maintain than private clouds.

Furthermore, anyone having the right credentials can submit access to the cloud, from either a computer terminal connected to the Internet or from other devices such as a tablet or a smartphone.

A hybrid cloud combines some of the features of private and public clouds. One of the greatest advantages of using hybrid clouds is the greater number of customization options. You can add, delete or edit the current applications running on your cloud.

If you wish to share sensitive information, you can always opt for the private cloud feature with better security. Alternately, you can migrate some of your non-sensitive data on the public side of the cloud.

4. Mobile Cloud Storage

Mobile cloud storage allows users to store and manage files, photos, music, and videos from their mobile devices (laptops, tablets and smartphones). Many new mobile phones come with preloaded and configured cloud storage that can be used to back up the devices files. iOS devices use iCloud, Apples mobile cloud storage service. Android-operating devices use Google Drive, while Samsung Galaxy has a partnership with Dropbox. We compared the features of iCloud vs Dropbox, so you can learn more from our extensive review:

Related:ICloud Vs Dropbox Cloud Storage Comparison

5 Advantages of Cloud Storage

Below we highlight 5 obvious benefits of cloud storage:

Companies and individuals using cloud-based services are more likely to cut back on operating costs than those who still use in-house hosting solutions or external hard drives. Furthermore, according to the recent online polls on cloud storage, the average cost of one gigabyte of storage space is around 3 cents.

Consider migrating your data to a third-party cloud storage service to avoid cluttering and to ease operations.

As we mentioned in our introductory remarks, you can access all files, folder, photos, and videos in the cloud from anywhere in the world. Of course, provided you have the necessary credentials and internet access.

One of the greatest advantages of using cloud storage is that youll always have a backup solution in case something goes wrong. If something happens to the files on a computer, you can always access the cloud and retrieve any data that may have been damaged or lost.

If youve committed any changes to one or more files, the cloud will automatically sync the changes across all affiliated devices.

Most cloud storage providers tend to add extra layers of security protocols. They do this in order to prevent your files and folders from either ending up in the wrong hands or from being lost.

5 Disadvantages of Using Cloud Storage

Below we outline some of the weaknesses of cloud storage:

Since cloud-based solutions depend on the speed of your Internet upload and download speed, having a low latency can impede you from accessing the data in real time. Also, there are still many areas around the globe where you cant connect to the Internet.

For a corporation or a small business, cloud storage services are sound solutions. However, for home devices, these costs may be too high to handle.

Although the goal of cloud-based services is to minimize our dependency on physical storage devices, a large number of businesscloud storage services require the presence of a physical hard drive as well.

Customer support is not one of the stronger points of cloud storage vendors. Cloud storage providers usually instruct clients to take a closer look at the FAQ or follow online forums.

After migrating the data to a third-party cloud storage provider, there is a bit of an issue concerning who owns the information. Is it the company, as a client, or the cloud storage provider?

What is cloud storage? Its a new concept in cloud computing models that allows faster information deployment, little management, and little supervision. There are of course advantages and disadvantages for opting for this kind of services. Its up to you to figure out whether its worth it or not.

Nowadays, however, most large cloud storage providers have a diverse offer when it comes to storage plans and pricing. Plans and offers vary from provider to provider. However, most include at least some service packages for home use, as well as cloud storage plans for small businesses or large corporations. What is your experience with cloud storage? Comment below!

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What Is Cloud Storage and What Are Its Advantages?