Three Mistakes Enterprises Make with Edge Storage

There are three common mistakes made by enterprise organisations today with edge storage strategies.

Investing too much manpower. IT departments everywhere are spending huge amount of efforts on managing edge storage. When employees get a new laptop, IT needs to transfer their data from the old to the new. When a small branch office server fails, IT needs to drive to a remote location, spend days on restoring the data from a backup and getting everything running again. That’s expensive, inefficient and scales poorly. Relying solely on edge storage is truly “living on the edge,” and not in a positive way – it’s a big mistake.

Investing too much IT spend. This applies to file services use cases specifically, as advances in AI and machine learning are certainly requiring increasing amounts of edge storage. But for customers today the most common use case is the ability to provide them with a solution for remote offices and remote branches distributed around the world. The use case often combines the ability to store the data at the edge with a centralised management platform in the cloud.

Not thinking through the potential challenges. Think of a video surveillance system – it may seem obvious that you want surveillance footage to live in cloud storage and not at the edge. This is due to the physical security of the cloud, along with inherent redundancy, infinite elasticity and very low cost storage tiers which are suitable for long term archival – a perfect match. However, in practice this choice has its problems – would you be able to keep footage recording during an Internet service interruption? And do you need to be able to quickly retrieve videos locally from the archive? Those limitations mean that edge storage remains as important as ever.

And so for many enterprise customers, the solution has been a hybrid solution that combines the benefits of edge storage and the cloud storage, and this is where “Edge to Cloud” comes to play.

The key technology needed in order to achieve cloud and edge synergy is edge caching – often in the form of edge gateways. These gateways suck up all the files from the old servers– including the security ACLs and shares that took so much time to set up – and push everything to the cloud, while exposing the same experience as a traditional network share.

Adding a layer of smart local caching makes everything feel as fast and responsive as before. These caching devices – which are today available in hardware or software form – also allow companies to continue creating files locally during an Internet service interruption; and to continue editing frequently used files.

Since the data now lives in the cloud, but is accessible at local speeds from anywhere across the globe, new cross-site collaboration opportunities emerge that were not possible before. Suddenly all that previously “dark” data is completely accessible – in a company’s own private cloud– in a searchable, analysable and shareable repository. Data is the new gold, and “Edge to Cloud” allows organisations to tap into all their data, from everywhere.  And that has some real impact on the business. All enterprise CIOs should be seriously looking into implementing an “edge to cloud” paradigm in their enterprises.