Contributed article by Noam Shendar, VP of Business Development, Zadara Storage

Enterprise Cloud Floodgates Open, "as-a-Service" Reigns

We've heard it before, but this time it's for real.  The year 2014 will see enterprise applications move to the cloud en masse, and the data center itself become more like the cloud.

All signs point to Enterprise Cloud floodgates opening.  It's a perfect storm: the technology has matured, the customers have taken the time to get comfortable with the approach, and pricing has become too good to resist.  Big databases, CRM and financials will move over, and once they depart the on-premises world, cloud agility, economics and scale will keep them there.

$0.01 is the new $0.10.  Today $0.01/GB/month is the going rate for archival storage and $0.10/GB/month is the going rate for online storage.  Google has just announced $0.04/GB/month for online storage.  It's amazing how quickly storage costs are plummeting.  How much can the gap shrink by this time next year?

Virtual Storage completes the cloud, and "as-a-Service" reigns.  Compute is already well virtualized, and SDN is making networking the next wave of virtualization. All that remains of the "data center troika" is storage, whose virtualization is a perfect companion for Storage as a Service (STaaS).

Storage-as-a-Service will continue to take primary storage from incumbents.  IDC's Q3 2013 external disk storage report showed a 5.6% decline from the prior year's Q3, as did the open networked disk storage systems business.  Cloud storage has been siphoning off business from traditional storage hardware vendors, mainly for disaster recovery, backup and archive.  In 2014 we will see continued high double-digit growth in Storage-as-a-Service (cloud-based STaaS) approaches, driven by primary storage moving to the cloud and facilitated by enterprise-grade features.

##

About the Author