Storage as a Service
Storage as a service (SaaS) is a cloud business model in which a company leases or rents its storage infrastructure to another company or individuals to store data.
Small companies and individuals often find this to be a convenient methodology for managing backups, and providing cost savings in personnel, hardware and physical space.
As an alternative to storing magnetic tapes offsite in a vault, IT administrators are meeting their storage and backup needs by service level agreements (SLAs) with an SaaS provider, usually on a cost-per-gigabyte-stored and cost-per-data-transferred basis. The client transfers the data meant for storage to the service provider on a set schedule over the SaaS provider’s wide area network or over the Internet.
The storage provider provides the client with the software required to access their stored data. Clients use the software to perform standard tasks associated with storage, including data transfers and data backups. Corrupted or lost company data can easily be restored.
Storage as a service is prevalent among small to mid-sized businesses, as no initial budget is required to set up hard drives, servers and IT staff. SaaS is also marketed as an excellent technique to mitigate risks in disaster recovery by providing long-term data storage and enhancing business stability.
Storage as a service is fast becoming the method of choice to all small and medium scale businesses. This is because storing files remotely rather than locally boasts an array of advantages for professional users.
Top 10 advantage of Storage as a Services
- Cost– factually speaking, backing up data isn’t always cheap, especially when take the cost of equipment into account. Additionally, there is the cost of the time it takes to manually complete routine backups. Storage as a service reduces much of the cost associated with traditional backup methods, providing ample storage space in the cloud for a low monthly fee.
- Invisibility – Storage as a service is invisible, as no physical presence of it is seen in its deployment and so it doesn’t take up valuable office space.
- Security – In this service type, data is encrypted both during transmission and while at rest, ensuring no unauthorized user access to files.
- Automation – Storage as a service makes the tedious process of backing up easy to accomplish through automation. Users can simply select what and when they want to backup, and the service does all the rest.
- Accessibility – By going for storage as a service, users can access data from smart phones, netbooks to desktops and so on.
- Syncing – Syncing ensures your files are automatically updated across all of your devices. This way, the latest version of a file a user saved on their desktop is available on your smart phone.
- Sharing – Online storage services allow the users to easily share data with just a few clicks
- Collaboration – Cloud storage services are also ideal for collaboration purposes. They allow multiple people to edit and collaborate on a single file or document. Thus, with this feature users need not worry about tracking the latest version or who has made what changes.
- Data Protection – By storing data on cloud storage services, data is well protected by all kind of catastrophes such as floods, earthquakes and human errors.
- Disaster Recovery – as said earlier, data stored in cloud is not only protected from catastrophes by having the same copy at several places, but can also favor disaster recovery to ensure business continuity.
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