“There’s really no need to store any data on premises in your building. Don’t do it. It’s too expensive and not reliable enough.”
This bold statement came from David Snipp, CTO, Stardraw.com in a Tuesday InfoComm education session, “Cloud Computing and Big Data – What is it? How does it work? Why you should care”. Snipp detailed how scalability, elasticity, reliability, and accessibility are just some of the major benefits to
cloud computing.
“The Fourth Utility it is – soon to be as common and cheap as water,” he said.
Perhaps the best part of the cloud is its elasticity, observed Snipp. Storage is literally unlimited and can be scaled in minutes. A business’s servers can take a pounding at certain times, but it’s straightforward to add more servers for a few days, then scale back down.
Reliability is an increasingly attractive aspect of cloud services. Each file is essentially stored across multiple servers; should one fail, a new copy is created. All of them would have to fail at the exact same time to truly lose your data, which, Snipp noted, is virtually impossible.
There are many misperceptions about the security of data in the cloud, Snipp said, but he noted that in the event of a theft or network intrusion, the cloud enables precise analysis of a break-in, and it can be rolled back in minutes.
As annual global IP traffic is predicted to hit 1.3 zettabytes by 2016, the cloud is the platform to support global business.
