Enterprises Encounter Cloud Storage Cost and Management Challenges

Although it seems that enterprises are flocking to the cloud for their IT needs, data storage in particular, a new survey from DataCore Software suggests that a good number of organizations are running into trouble during the transition.

“Challenges and false starts with technologies have introduced reluctance in the industry to fully commit to software-defined, hyperconverged or a hybrid data storage infrastructure,” wrote Paul Nashawaty, product evangelist and director of Technical Marketing at DataCore Software, in a blog post. “Until recently, the promise of cloud, ease of use, and faster application performance have fallen short of expectations.”

Some of those expectations include storage services that don’t break the budget.

Despite claims by vendors that cloud storage is cheaper than on-premises solutions, the opposite is often true. Nearly a third (31 percent) of the 426 IT professionals quizzed for the company’s State of Software-Defined Storage, Hyperconverged and Cloud Storage survey (registration required) said that instead of slashing costs, their move to cloud storage increased costs instead.

Storage management was a key factor in why many organizations are having a tough time containing cloud costs. Twenty-nine percent of respondents said management proved to be more difficult on the cloud.

Continuing the theme of data storage disappointments, DataCore discovered that speedy flash storage also fell short for some organizations. Sixteen percent said the technology did little to accelerate their applications.

In terms of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), systems that typically integrate storage, compute, networking and virtualization, more than a third (34 percent) are strongly considering the technology. Forty-one percent define HCI as a hardware-agnostic solution that is tightly integrated with a hypervisor and 27 percent expected an integrated appliance in which hardware and software are tightly interlocked.

Generally, enterprises are considering HCI for their database workloads (34 percent) and their data center consolidation projects (28 percent). Another 28 percent of respondents are eyeing HCI to power their enterprise applications.

Meanwhile, IT executives remain wary of hybrid-cloud deployments.

More than half of the survey takers cited sensitive data and security as main reasons to avoid the cloud. Forty-seven percent said that they had no plans to move any type of application to the cloud, of either the public or hybrid variety.

A third (33 percent) said they expected to move some enterprise applications and data analytics workloads (22 percent). Cloud databases and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) services were appealing solutions for 21 percent and 16 percent of respondents, respectively.

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at Enterprise Storage Forum. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.