Every other headline I read mentions cloud computing or cloud storage. Analyst firm IDC estimates that global revenue from cloud services could grow from $17.4 billion in 2009 to $44.2 billion in 2013. Since the adoption of cloud infrastructures is starting to have a significant impact on data protection, it is time for me to weigh in on the topic.

Why the Interest in Cloud Computing?
Cloud computing promises to save money, improve service levels, and reduce risk by consolidating and virtualizing IT resources in a single, high efficiency environment. Virtualization frees IT managers from the physical limits of server sizes, bandwidth limitations, storage configuration constraints and processor limits and enables them to allocate resources as they are needed.

Public/external clouds enable medium-sized enterprises to effectively buy a level of IT service that they could not afford to provide themselves. Although the media buzz focuses on external clouds, large enterprises are more often using an internal cloud model to improve utilization of IT resources and control data growth. Essentially, they are creating a centralized, virtualized IT environment where processing, storage, disaster recovery and other IT resources can be dynamically allocated on demand to departments and business units worldwide.

Whether public or private, a successful cloud implementation must have a well-designed cloud storage / data protection environment to be successful.

Minimum requirements for Cloud Storage and Data Protection
Both external cloud providers and large enterprises are looking to protect data in the cloud. There are several minimum technical requirements for a cloud -- public or private to deliver on its promises.

Storage Pools
Given the wide range of data types and data sources in a cloud environment, IT managers need to be able to separate and allocate resources to different pools of data – from data tiering to policy management, to classes of service. They need to be able to separate data into pools each with its own disk type, deduplication configuration, replication priority, backup policies, and/or backup application. All of these pools need to be managed from a single, unified management console.

Multi-tenancy and Charge-back
Public cloud providers and private cloud enterprises need to be able to achieve economies of scale by collocating multiple customers or business units on a single backup device. They need the ability to track usage of resources at the customer or business unit level.

Detailed Reporting and Management
To manage a public or private cloud, IT managers need access to critical data on utilization, trends in capacity and processing usage, and tracking results for system optimization, load balancing and future planning for expansion,

Global Deduplication
To keep cloud storage cost-effective and to gain the benefits of consolidating data storage resources, cloud providers need to be able to leverage a secure multi-tenancy infrastructure and then deduplicate data across nodes and storage for maximum optimization of each customer environment. At the same time, you need to be able to prevent deduplication across storage pools to ensure data is not comingled.

High Performance
Cloud storage providers need to backup, replicate, and restore massive data volumes as quickly as possible so a scalable multinode grid architecture is essential to meeting the on demand service level objectives of the customer

Summary
IT organizations have limited time, resources and money and the future for cloud solutions is compelling for customer investments today. As the requirement to reduce risk and provide the highest levels of availability to critical information assets has become paramount to every organization, data protection has elevated itself as the “Killer App” for the cloud. This is an emerging market with high growth potential and vendors like SEPATON with proven robust enterprise class solutions are well positioned to capitalize on this opportunity.

As our dependence on data grows, private sector enterprises can learn an important lesson from military and intelligence agencies. That is, to protect data effectively, you need a secure way to destroy it.

The fact is, enterprises are generating record-breaking volumes of data and regulations are requiring them to retain it for longer periods of time. The sheer volume of data to be managed and protected has added significant cost and risk to every phase of the data protection lifecycle - from optimized backup, to replication, to archive, and to final destruction.

While most CIOs acknowledge the importance of adopting faster, more cost-effective ways to backup, deduplicate, and replicate data, few appreciate the importance of efficient, secure data destruction. In many organizations, it still remains a manual process of shredding or demagnetizing physical tapes. After all, how difficult or expensive is it to destroy a physical tape?

That’s where the record-breaking data volumes come in. At the volumes being managed in today’s data center, the cost and risk is exorbitant. For example, there is the administrative time (labor cost) spent keeping track of data to be destroyed. The manual task (more labor cost) of unmounting and cataloging tapes. The risk of human error. The risk of tape loss, theft, or mishandling. This risk is particularly acute while tapes sit around waiting for a shredding service to arrive. Imagine the cost of losing a single tape cartridge with customer account information, medical records, proprietary IP, or email on it.

Let’s not forget the cost of actually destroying and disposing of physical tape media. That plastic takes an environmental toll as well. When the data is destroyed, you need to record their destruction for auditing purposes. That adds more admin labor and potential for human error.

Recognizing a growing need for a better solution, SEPATON announced Secure Erasure™ for our data protection appliances. Now you can retain more of your data online – with 2 TB disk drives and deduplication, you can do afford to keep enormous volumes of data online. With Secure Erasure, you have a simple secure way to destroy virtual cartridges when the data is no longer needed. All that administration time is reduced to a simple push of a button. It automatically provides an email of what cartridge was destroyed – no more manual auditing. No wasted media (disk is reusable) and no plastic cartridges to dispose of – delivering a greener data center.