The more I learn about cloud storage the more I am convinced that every small and mid-sized company should be actively considering it. It’s good for the enterprise, too, but for smaller companies that lack sizable IT staff, it really makes sense.
The simplest reason is that the volume of data is just exploding, often doubling in just one year. So the two terabytes of data in your company today will become 16 TB in 2015. Just managing it as well as securing that management will eat up huge amounts of your IT staff time.
But moreover, increasing amounts of new data will be so-called unstructured data, things like email, Excel docs, social media data, and so on. What your IT staff really needs to be focused upon is not storing and managing this data, but rather upon how to analyze it in predictive ways. That’s what big companies will be doing with Big Data.
Consider some of the benefits of cloud storage, in addition to not personally thrashing about with directly managing and securing it. When you leverage the cloud to store your data, your users securely can access that data from any location that has Internet access, which is to say just about everywhere.