What are storage services in Cloud?
Cloud storage is a service offering where one can store, edit and retrieve data from a storage server. This service aims to ease business by providing organizations with offsite storage capacity that can be delivered instantly, accessible globally, and flexible.
The Storage Service Provider (SSP) provides, hosts, and manages cloud storage services. These storage services store files, databases, and other information, offering flexible, pay-as-you-go pricing and scalability. Cloud storage providers also provide unlimited growth and can increase and decrease storage capacity on demand.
Fact: AWS claims that S3 offers “11 9’s” of reliability – 99.999999999% uptime.
What benefit does storage service bring in?
It’s 2022, and cloud storage service has become one of the most convenient and efficient methods to store data online safely. When a user shifts to cloud storage, rather than saving the data at local storage or hard disk, they start storing data somewhere at a remote location that can be easily accessed through the internet, anywhere and anytime.
Some benefits that storage services can bring in are:
1. Accessibility – Mostly, all cloud services are flexible and have an easy-to-use user interface that provides a drag-and-drop feature. For example, Google Drive from Google has a simple interface where one can easily upload files on their online drive without any expert knowledge. A saved file from the mobile phone drive can be retrieved and used from a computer or any other device with good internet connectivity. A good enough internet connection is needed to access the files saved online in the data centers.
2. Security – Any information connected to the internet becomes a primary safety concern, especially for small and big-scale businesses that use cloud storage services. It becomes a matter of utmost importance for them to choose the best security service in cloud service to safeguard valuable information. Cloud storage saves the data across all the data centers. Even when the data is damaged or collapsed, it can be managed from other data centers, keeping the data under strict supervision. A copy of the data is stored at different data centers, as a backup, for any mishap or damage that might be caused.
3. Automation – The usage of cloud storage is like a hard disk on the system that does not hamper any ongoing task while a certain piece of information is being stored in the cloud. The multiuser access works with ease in a cloud storage service. There may be more than one user using a cloud storage service. When either of two users is performing a task, neither of their work will be ruined and damaged, as all of it is managed and automated by the cloud vendor.
4. Disaster Recovery – Every business suffers from data loss and information breaches. All businesses keep a backup storage plan to store all the copies of their data. A crisis occurs, and the business loses the data; they can retrieve data from their backup plan. Cloud storage is the exact solution to this problem of storing backed-up data. Cloud storage service provides the best platform for disaster recovery data. If there is a data loss, the business can use cloud storage as backup storage and retrieve the backed-up data from the cloud when required.
5. Cost – Unlike the traditional way of storing information and paying a whole amount, all the cloud services now follow the Pay-as-you-go model, preventing unnecessary storage costs.
What are the various storage services that AWS offers?
1. Amazon S3: Amazon Simple Storage Service, also known as S3, is a widely used object storage service. It provides a range of features, varying from immense scalability to availability and security. Due to these features, start-up to enterprise-level companies uses this storage service. Amazon S3 is always protected, irrespective of the amount of stored data. It is managed from the AWS backend, all at a minimal cost. S3 is on-demand high availability and guarantees 99.9% durability. This storage service is utilized for streaming services as well.
2. Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Storage): EBS is a scalable, easy-to-use storage service with a high-performance block storage service. On the one hand, S3 allows object storage, while on the other, Amazon EBS provides block storage. EBS is a storage service where data must be quickly accessible and requires long-term persistence. It is well-suited for file systems, databases, and applications. One of the benefits of using EBS is it can be scaled up and down as per resources and whenever required. The availability of Amazon EBS is in both SSD and HDD formats.
3. Snowball Device: The AWS Snowball service transfers large amounts of data. Any transfer of less than 10TB of data will result in a bad economical choice. It uses physical storage devices to transfer large amounts of data between Amazon S3 and onsite data storage locations at faster-than-internet speeds. AWS Snowball saves time and money. With Snowball, which provides a powerful interface, one can create jobs, track data, and track jobs’ status.
Snowball devices are protected by the AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS) since they are physically rugged. The KMS keeps the data secure and protects it.
4. Glacier: Amazon S3 Glacier is a storage service that is secure, durable, and comes at a low cost. It is an Amazon S3 storage class that provides data archiving and long-term backup service. While on Glacier, customers can loosen the burdens of operating and scaling storage to AWS without worrying about hardware failure and recovery, data replication, and time-consuming hardware migration. Customers can store their data cost-effectively for months, years, and even decades. S3 has many different storage services; Glacier is one of them.
5. Amazon EFS (Elastic File System): Amazon EFS is a storage service to ease the enormous analytical workload. It is a type where the storage size automatically increases and shrinks, justifying the term elastic, according to the addition and removal of files, without any need for management. It is built to scale to petabytes without causing interruptions to any applications. A storage service that is fully managed, highly durable, and available, offering the best security and compliance. EFS has a distributed file system and can be clubbed with CDN (Content Delivery Network), allowing multiple EC2 instances to access the elastic file system simultaneously.
6. Amazon Storage Gateway: Amazon Storage Gateway service is a hybrid set of cloud storage services that provides on-premise access to virtual cloud storage. Many organizations run a hybrid cloud setup; some workloads run on the data centers, and some on the AWS cloud. In such scenarios, Amazon Storage Gateway helps on-premise applications access the data stored on the AWS cloud.
Storage Gateway helps reduce business costs, maintenance, and scaling challenges while managing on-premises storage environments. Legacy backup stores are an added feature with this storage service, eliminating the cost of setting up an external engineer for the backup.
Among so many services, which to choose?
Amazon S3, an object storage built-in, is the best and most widely used storage service. It stores and retrieves data, of any amount, from anywhere. This storage service offers availability, performance, security, and 99.999% durability at low and reasonable costs. S3 provides its users with the same service access that Amazon uses for its network of websites, hence gaining customer trust.
What role does Rapyder play in your business with storage services?
Rapyder is an agile cloud consulting company with innovative solutions for its customers. Rapyder can be a part of your business transformation with the AWS storage services by reducing costs, accelerating innovations, and increasing agility.
Rapyder provides the best storage services backed with 24*7 support and assistance. Whether accessing storage faster, saving storage costs, or securing your storage, Rapyder is there to do it all and help you.
Conclusion
This blog covers a detailed explanation of what are storage services in Cloud, their benefits, and some of the best storage services offered by AWS.
Based on the requirements, enterprises can decide which storage service to choose for their business or contact us to receive the best cloud storage services.
