As I watched the latest movie on You Tube I silently thanked its founders for their ingenious creation. Then I stopped to ponder what is it that makes this fantastic website so popular?
It is the millions of movies, songs, and video clips uploaded and stored for us to access and use. That is actually what makes it click; the same holds true for others of its kind.
We all use repositories like Gmail, Facebook, Googledocs to store our emails, photographs, videos, personal as well as official files; In fact a substantial portion of our life is stored in virtual repositories. However do we ever stop to realize that we are in fact using a wonderful technology called Cloud Storage.
Storing in the Cloud
The SearchCloudStorage website on Techtarget provides a good definition of the concept – “Cloud storage is a service model in which data is maintained, managed and backed up remotely and made available to users over a network (typically the Internet).”
(Source: http://searchcloudstorage.techtarget.com/definition/cloud-storage)
Information is usually stored in multiple data servers leading to redundancy. However, in the Cloud world, redundancy is desired as it enables customers to access information anytime, anywhere.
Storage Gateway – As the name suggests, Storage Gateways are entry points through which client requests are routed to the data servers. The need for gateways arose in order to resolve incompatibility issues between traditional and cloud storage technologies. It interprets and establishes communication between the protocols and thus easy connectivity.
Cloud Storage Service Provider – These are organizations that offer Cloud Storage services. Some of the big names in the league include iCloud, skydrive ,Amazon Cloud Drive, Dropbox , and Google Drive .
Primary Data Storage – This refers to the storage with which the organization currently interacts; adds edits or deletes the data. This is not the back up data. The data thus stored needs to be accessed quickly.
Technology simplifies life. However, we need a good hang of it in order to utilize its benefits effectively. The basic concepts explained here are just appetizers. There is a full course meal awaiting us. So get your basics right and jump into the clouds.
