Who is accountable for cloud storage? You are.

The need for end-to-end accountability

By Deni Connor, senior analyst
Storage Strategies NOW

Surely not the cloud storage provider, you say. It’s your responsibility – the consumer of storage – to choose a cloud storage provider that can provide that accountability for issues that are often out of your control.

It’s also difficult to implement cloud storage when you have to choose multiple vendors to meet your needs for cloud gateways, WAN acceleration and cloud storage – vendors who all promise that they work together well and will protect your data from loss and corruption. You need to ensure that they do work together to resolve your problem, but as you’ve seen with the Amazon and Dropbox events, their partners had little effect in solving the issue. Customers weren’t able to access their data or that data was unprotected – and the vendor you chose wasn’t accountable for it. In addition, when you are working with multiple vendors for your cloud storage project, when it comes to finger-pointing for a data loss or unavailability of data, there’s no one vendor to point the finger at.

Further, visualize companies such as EMC, who has enabled both private and public cloud storage platforms using its EMC-branded products and software and partnerships with service providers such as AT&T or Peer1 Hosting or Rackspace. When problems occur, who is at fault? EMC? AT&T? Rackspace? Who is accountable for data latency, data availability, data corruption or data loss? Further, who’s responsible for end-to-end network visibility, management and QoS?

To offer the most successful cloud storage – either private, public or hybrid – you need a vendor that owns and manages both ends and the middle of the storage network – the cloud gateway, private and public cloud infrastructure and the cloud service. When dealing with multiple providers, you can’t rely on one vendors’ assurance that your data will be safe in the hands of one of its partners.

There are few vendors that offer full accountability for private, public and hybrid cloud deployments. Nirvanix is one of them. The company offers a cloud gateway, private cloud enablement and public cloud service provider capabilities. It offers the Nirvanix Cloud Storage Network, the company’s enterprise-class public cloud service; a cloud gateway for storing unstructured backup and archive data called CloudNAS; a Web Services API that allows access to the Nirvanix Cloud Storage Network, and finally if the public cloud isn’t what you want, the company can also implement local cloud storage instantiations in your data center with its Hybrid Cloud Storage and Private Cloud Storage solutions.. And it manages all this with the Nirvanix Management Portal, not a separate management product.

With the Nirvanix Cloud Storage Network and Nirvanix’s portfolio of cloud solutions, customers can put their trust in cloud storage again and receive accountability from a single source.

Note: Nirvanix is a client of Storage Strategies NOW. The information and recommendations made by Storage Strategies NOW are based upon public information and sources and may also include personal opinions both of Storage Strategies NOW and others, all of which we believe to be accurate and reliable. As market conditions change however, and not within our control, the information and recommendations are made without warranty of any kind. All product names used and mentioned herein are the trademarks of their respective owners. Storage Strategies NOW, Inc. assumes no responsibility or liability for any damages whatsoever (including incidental, consequential or otherwise), caused by your use of, or reliance upon, the information and recommendations presented herein, nor for any inadvertent errors which may appear in this document.