Bringing Cloud Storage into the Hybrid Era

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An interesting anomaly has quietly evolved in large enterprises in recent years. As organizations have rightly come to revere cloud computing as the path to true scalability, efficiency, and economics, one corner of it – storage – has been left to wallow in the silos of yesteryear, with limited advances or innovation.

Researchers continue to predict that the digital universe will expand at a rapid rate, topping 44 zettabytes by 2020 (that’s over 44 billion terabytes), up from 1.8ZB just five years ago.

To help cope with this growth, enterprises are turning to hybrid cloud computing, which delivers management and support of on-premise and cloud-based computing infrastructures and applications. In fact, such obvious tangible benefits as improved scalability, IT flexibility, and economics has most researchers predicting continued growth for the hybrid cloud market, one estimating an annual growth rate of 27%.

Storage, however, has not experienced the same advances. When it comes to data storage, organizations have been left to manage their growing data volumes much as they have been for the past 10 years – either on in-house devices, or in the cloud, but not together.

Until now.

The release of IBM Cloud Object Storage last week enables organizations for the first time to scale large unstructured data volumes across on-premise storage systems on public and/or private clouds or as hybrid solutions with combinations of on-premises and cloud. Enterprises will finally have the capabilities they’ve leveraged with hybrid cloud computing at the data storage level: dramatic increases in flexibility, availability, and better economics.

For the first time they will be able to quickly and easily store, manage and access their object data – what some researchers say makes up 80% of the digital universe – across their hybrid clouds.

But it doesn’t stop there. We’ve gone to great lengths to bring advanced capabilities to the world of hybrid cloud storage, like encrypted data slicing. With this innovation, the system automatically breaks up incoming data into slices and stores the different pieces across geographically dispersed systems. As a result, the data is not only secure, but available in the event of a breach, hack or natural disaster.

As the hybrid cloud platform advances ever more quickly, and adoption rates climb, it was about time that storage was brought along for the ride. Enterprises around the world will reap the benefits.
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Related Stories:

Why Business Shouldn’t Settle for Just Any Storage – Thoughts on Cloud
Beyond Four Walls: Rocketing Into Hybrid Cloud – In the Making

Partner Perspectives:

Hybrid Matters – Panzura
A Platform for Hybrid Cloud Enterprise Services – CTERA
IBM Cloud Object Storage – Nasuni
IBM COS: The Foundation of the Digital & Cognitive Eras – Mark III Systems