Today, data is the new Oil. Every organisation is a data organisation, whether they admit it or not. Data empowers you to make informed decisions. Data is also critical to help you identify problems.
Significant IT budget is spent on storage: procurement, security, availability and life cycle. At Red Oak Consulting, our highly skilled experts have the knowledge to advise on architecture, costs and modelling.
Did you know there are different storage tiers?
- Scratch: performance is the most important consideration; delays can cause damage to the organization.
- Hot: data in constant use by the business, performance is important but needs to be balanced with cost.
- Cold: data that may be required by organizational users but is not in constant use, focused is on the cost rather than performance.
- Archive: data that is rarely or never accessed. It may only be maintained for regulatory reasons or may be kept because it might have value in the future.
On-premise storage means you will have to invest a large amount of capital in hardware, installation, software licensing, data backup, extra IT services, support and more. Running costs, such as energy, support and hosting, are generally lower than the capital exposure but need to factored in. You will have only a few occasions over a period of years to pick your storage solution or solutions based on the current and future workloads and requirements.
Cloud storage has no upfront costs but you will pay for what you use (used/allocated space, operations, data transfers) depending on the service and tier. You can easily adapt the storage service and/or tier to your workload to minimise cost and maximise availability and/or performance.
Moving to the Cloud requires a deep understanding of which storage solutions are available and when and how to use them. Which one is “better” for a specific workload or multiple workloads with set requirements?
