Infographic: The state of cloud storage in 2013

It is no secret that large volumes of data and numerous applications now reside in the cloud. As businesses continue to transform risk into opportunity, the market is likely to benefit from continued momentum, but it is also helpful to step back and analyze the current situation. To this end, CloudTweaks recently put together an infographic looking at the state of cloud storage in 2013. Profiling Amazon's S3 offering, the news source noted that the company currently houses one trillion objects in its cloud, or enough for 3.3 objects for every star in the Milky Way galaxy. Other observations include:

  • An estimated one exabyte of data is stored in the cloud
  • More than 75 percent of enterprise files stored in the cloud are 10 MB or less
  • Close to 50 percent of Global 1,000 companies will use cloud storage for sensitive customer data by the end of 2016

The increasingly widespread adoption of enterprise cloud storage has created significant challenges for IT departments, as they are tasked with monitoring usage, ensuring data security and maintaining end user productivity. As a result, CloudTweaks identified performance, availability and the number of errors as the three most important benchmarks for evaluating services providers.

The infographic pulls data from Nasuni's latest industry report, which further explained the advancements that providers have made toward improving across critical metrics. Microsoft performed particularly well, surpassing its competitors in read/write benchmark tests while exhibiting the fewest errors throughout 100 million reads and writes. However, the company was second in scalability and availability. Nasuni analysts also noted that there has been a new top-ranking provider each year the report has been published.

"One interesting lesson from the review process was that some CSPs required the creation of brand new accounts to take advantage of improved infrastructure," the report stated. "While simple for testing, this is unacceptable in the real world and represents a clear deviation from the traditional Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) model."

2013-02-21T09:43:27+00:00

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