In 2022, companies choose to use the cloud for the resiliency.
Storage is quickly becoming a cheap, fast, one-size-fits all commodity. That’s why most data is moving to the cloud. It doesn’t make any more sense these days to run your own on-premises storage than it would to run your own electric generating plant.
Typically you can store data in Bifrost Cloud’s storage backend for less than just the annual maintenance on the same amount of on-premises storage from vendors like Dell EMC and NetApp. If you don’t absolutely need to run storage on-premises, it’s cheaper and a lot less hassle to leave it to a cloud storage specialist like Bifrost Cloud.
There are a lot of hidden costs to running on-premises storage. Some of these are hard costs, such as equipment purchase, data center costs, electricity, and manpower. Other costs are soft costs, such as the distraction factor, the fact that you have IT personnel baby-sitting storage servers instead of working on things that will really move your business forward, or the risk that your on-premises equipment could become obsolete more quickly than planned. For example, today’s “hot” servers could seem tired and slow in a few years, while the performance of cloud storage will continue to be state-of-the-art. And while the cost of cloud storage has historically dropped dramatically over time, once you purchase on-premises storage, you’re stuck with the cost.
On the surface, on-prem storage seems like it would be a cost-effective approach, given that you can specify every aspect of your implementation. But, many of these costs become hidden amongst your organization’s larger operating budgets, cemented into the annual overhead with little regard for revisiting or optimizing that spend. CFOs and CTOs tasked with cost management would do well to know, with confidence, where on-prem dollars are going:
Capital Expenditures (CapEx) – With any on-prem approach, there are significant equipment costs upfront. Also, the initial ROI often takes years to recognize due to the upfront costs for equipment, personnel, training, etc.
Operating Expenditures (OpEx) – With any large on-prem setup, you’ll have any or all of the following operational costs:
One of the most important roles of your storage infrastructure is your ability to back-up and protect your data in case of a problem – whether it’s a small scale file recovery need or a full-blown disaster recovery scenario, failing over to a remote location or straight into the cloud.
As your company grows, this issue becomes more pressing while the solution becomes more difficult. This is why it is critical to choose a storage solution that ensures your data is available whenever you need it. Bifrost Cloud’s distributed erasure coding and extreme geo-redundancy provides as much assurance of data availability as any other solution on the market.
The process for migrating from on-premise to cloud storage is largely dependent on your data (size, structure, security needs) and your network connection speed. If, for example, you are one of the lucky few companies to have access to 100 gbps network speeds, and the size of your transferring data is less than 1 PB, then you could reasonably expect that the initial migration could occur within a few weeks. A slightly more common, yet still high, 10 gbps would take 10 times longer; and at 1 gbps, you’re looking at a pretty lengthy migration period if you’re doing the entire data transfer over the public internet.
No one wants the cloud migration process to drag out for several months if there is an option to safely increase the speed. Bifrost Cloud is extraordinarily flexible when it comes to data migration and is able to work with your team on a custom approach.
Once the initial migration has ended, you’ll continue using either a direct or public network connection to read, write, delete or update your cloud data, whichever your use cases require, and that suit your budget.
Make the migration, its worth it.