Behind such a simple-looking story is the painstaking work of engineers. Endless server racks, hard drives and talented administrators have not gone away. Physically, cloud storage is located at the provider; the equipment is hidden under the hood of the cloud service provider. He does everything for the client company – he manages the hardware, purchases and configures it if necessary, changes failed servers, gives tasks to administrators, monitors backups and solves other problems associated with data placement.
Cloud storage is a convenient way to store any information: personal files and petabytes of company data. The provider has a lot of disk space, as well as customers. This allows you to distribute the supply and demand for the service among all customers. If you do not need extra terabytes of free space now, you can now give them to someone else.
What Is Cloud Storage For Business?
File storages: The most understandable type of service for a simple user. It’s like “a hard drive that I can’t see but holds all my files.” This service has a file system that allows you to save files directly in the form in which they are on your computer or your phone. Of course, inside all this isn’t very easy, but for the end-user, it looks simple.
Such a service will be an excellent option for those who store large enough archives of files – they can easily fit into the system, and you can also organize collaboration in it, opening access to information to the right employees.
Examples of popular file services in the cloud for small businesses:
- Dropbox is an easy-to-manage service, available through a web interface or an application installed on a computer. Supports Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android operating systems.
- “Cloud VK” – a virtual disk with a flexible tariff scale. It has a high speed for uploading and downloading files. There is integration with local computers, VK mail, and antivirus protection.
- Google Drive – Convenient for Android phone users and those using other Google services.
All file systems have a free volume. However, it is not always enough for business tasks; in this case, it is better to purchase a paid package.
Object storage: They are arranged differently. They are typically used by machines and programs and are ideal for your application handling large amounts of client data.
What is cloud object storage for? It has an almost unlimited capacity to store vast arrays of any information, including unstructured information: photos, videos, documents, and so on, and manage access to it. In addition, the advantage of object systems is the ability of multiple devices to access the same data in parallel.
Block storage: Storage systems that provide quick access to what is placed in them. Any operating system can use them; they can be customized for any data you need – unlike, for example, a file system that only supports a specific file system. Absolute freedom of access and control, as if you were dealing with a hard drive inside your server!
This is a good solution, for example, for a DBMS. It is difficult to predict the amount of data in the database in advance, so instead of a hard disk, a block system is connected to the server, and the DBMS writes its data to it. As soon as the place runs out, you buy more space, and the database server increases the capacity many times. Without moving, adjustments and pain.
