In order to meet the required performance and availability data access services expected within production environments, enterprise cloud services’ providers will extend a portion of their storage cloud service assets on the client’s premises for handling both active data sets and connecting data replication technologies to their offsite clouds in order to meet geographic requirements associated with business continuity plans. By placing a portion of the cloud services at the client’s premises, cloud service providers can leverage data de-duplication technologies, thin provisioning, advanced archiving (and other emerging data storage management technologies) to reduce the data sets required for the disaster recovery strategy.
This has the incremental benefits of reducing data replication bandwidth costs, reducing offsite storage costs, while meeting necessary recover point objectives (RPO) and recover time objectives (RTO).
And with the convergence of storage resource management (SRM) technologies with traditional data management and replication technologies, many organizations will offload labor to the storage cloud services provider to allow their internal resources to focus on strategic initiatives.