We analysed Cloud Storage and SAAS products in the market as of 2023. Both Pros and Cons are there. But considering everything, overall is highly negative. Unless users stick to their own terms.
Negatives
- Companies entice everyone to come on board their cloud service by offering a reasonably low price for the first 1-5 years. Everyone will be okay for this reasonable price and will change all their internal systems to suit this style. (instead of backing up photos to a hard drive, they will do it straight to the cloud through a wifi – also to reduce the hassles of copying and pasting every few weeks)
- Companies will drop a price shock after 5 years and will either force everyone to pay 10% higher (and they do increase 2 times again in the next five years). Else they will increase by 15% and will start a new plan at same price but will cut down essential features (reduce 1tb per file limit to 10 GB etc). So, 80 percent of people will continue paying. They don’t mind if 20 percent switch out.
- Over the next 50 years – they keep reducing users’ freedom – like the ability to nest as much / have huge files etc. All will have to agree because by now, they don’t know how to manage things on a simple local hard drive / NAS
Positives
- If they are fair, things will be as it is now.
- Easier to access data.
About Cloud Storage
Cloud storage is a model of computer data storage in which the digital data is stored in logical pools, said to be on “the cloud”. The physical storage spans multiple servers (sometimes in multiple locations), and the physical environment is typically owned and managed by a hosting company. These cloud storage providers are responsible for keeping the data available and accessible, and the physical environment secured, protected, and running. People and organizations buy or lease storage capacity from the providers to store user, organization, or application data.
Cloud storage services may be accessed through a colocated cloud computing service, a web service application programming interface (API) or by applications that use the API, such as cloud desktop storage, a cloud storage gateway or Web-based content management systems.
History
Cloud computing is believed to have been invented by J. C. R. Licklider in the 1960s with his work on ARPANET to connect people and data from anywhere at any time.[1]
In 1983, CompuServe offered its consumer users a small amount of disk space that could be used to store any files they chose to upload.[2]
In 1994, AT&T launched PersonaLink Services, an online platform for personal and business communication and entrepreneurship. The storage was one of the first to be all web-based, and referenced in their commercials as, “you can think of our electronic meeting place as the cloud.”[3] Amazon Web Services introduced their cloud storage service Amazon S3 in 2006, and has gained widespread recognition and adoption as the storage supplier to popular services such as SmugMug, Dropbox, and Pinterest. In 2005, Box announced an online file sharing and personal cloud content management service for businesses.[4]
Architecture
A high level architecture of cloud storage.
Cloud storage is based on highly virtualized infrastructure and is like broader cloud computing in terms of interfaces, near-instant elasticity and scalability, multi-tenancy, and metered resources. Cloud storage services can be used from an off-premises service (Amazon S3) or deployed on-premises (ViON Capacity Services).[5]
There are three types of cloud storage: a hosted object storage service, file storage, and block storage. Each of these cloud storage types offer their own unique advantages.
Examples of object storage services that can be hosted and deployed with cloud storage characteristics include Amazon S3, Oracle Cloud Storage and Microsoft Azure Storage, object storage software like Openstack Swift, object storage systems like EMC Atmos, EMC ECS and Hitachi Content Platform, and distributed storage research projects like OceanStore[6] and VISION Cloud.[7]
Examples of file storage services include Amazon Elastic File System (EFS) and Qumulo Core,[8] used for applications that need access to shared files and require a file system. This storage is often supported with a Network Attached Storage (NAS) server, used for large content repositories, development environments, media stores, or user home directories.
A block storage service like Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS) is used for other enterprise applications like databases and often require dedicated, low latency storage for each host. This is comparable in certain respects to direct attached storage (DAS) or a storage area network (SAN).
Cloud storage is:[6]
Made up of many distributed resources, but still acts as one, either in a federated[9] or a cooperative storage cloud architecture
Highly fault tolerant through redundancy and distribution of data
Highly durable through the creation of versioned copies
Typically eventually consistent with regard to data replicas[10]
Advantages
