Background
Discuss about the Cloud Based Storage for its Advantages and Disadvantages.
Cloud computing is the systematic practice of transferring data from one location to another through the medium of Internet connection. It can be simply defined as the paradigm of the information technology, which is utilized for allowing as well as accessing all types of system resources for the purpose of public utility (Stanek et al. 2014). Cloud storage is the location where of cloud computing, where the data gets stored by the clients of cloud computing for getting easy and simple access to the data. The cloud storage comprises of various kinds of benefits and disadvantages that are required by the client to know.
This report will outline a significant research on the cloud storage with its benefits and disadvantages. There are various features or characteristics of the cloud storage that provide utmost benefits to their users. This report will highlight the various advantages and disadvantages of any cloud based storage with proper research. This report even provides significant details regarding the various features that are important in this topic.
Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider invented the concept of cloud computing in the year 1960. He was the first individual to understand and help all the users of cloud computing. He was working with ARPANET. The main aim of this invention was to make a connection between the data and the users perfectly and without any type of complexities. CompuServe was responsible for creating the first cloud data storage for all of its users. It was done in the year 1983 and in the year 1994, the popular organization known as AT&T was responsible for launching a specific online platform for its clients (Stefanov and Shi 2013). The name of this online platform was PersonaLink Services. It was mainly created by the organization for the entrepreneurs, both of business communication as well as personal communication. The storage made by them was completely web based and had an electronic meeting place just like cloud. Amazon Web Services solely introduced their first cloud storage in 2006 with the rest of the world. The services that adopted this cloud storage of AWS S3 were Smugmug, Synaptop, Dropbox, Pinterest and many more.
Methodology is the speculative analysis for all techniques, which are solely utilized for executing various activities or actions. The report is written by reviewing various peer reviewed article and thus by selecting the best twelve articles. These articles have helped to complete the report perfectly. Significant details have been provided here.
Methodology and Research Details
According to Fernando, Loke and Rahayu 2013, cloud computing is the best method of hassle free data transfer over the Internet. It helps the user to transfer any bulk amount of data easily.
As per Terry et al. 2013, cloud storage is responsible for storing any type of data effectively and effortlessly.
Cloud storage is considered as the most significant and important data storage, which could be used by various providers of cloud to perfectly preserve, organize, handle and taking backups of the data. Cloud data storage is solely responsible for all types of data handling and data related operations. It is the perfect integration of cloud computing and information system (Fernando, Loke and Rahayu 2013). There are various core and important benefits in cloud based storages. They help all the users to know about the data and store them without getting into any type of problem and complexity. Following are the several advantages of cloud storage.
- i) Usability and Easy Accessibility: This is one of the most important advantages of cloud storage. This storage could be easily utilized or used from anywhere on the Internet. The usability of this storage is very simple and so is the implementation of it. The easy accessibility is the other important advantage of the cloud based storage. The data can be easily accessed over the Internet, if it is being stored in the cloud based storage. As the data retrieval and access is very easy, it is utilized by various organizations and enterprises.
- ii) Data Integrity Verification: The second major advantage of the cloud storage is that the verification of the data integrity is not required (Li et al. 2013). This type of storage is responsible for providing data confidentiality and integrity to the clients of the cloud and they do not have to verify whether the data has integrity or not. This saves time of the clients as well as the cloud provider and thus can be termed as extremely helpful for them.
Inexpensive: The next major benefit of this cloud storage is that it is extremely inexpensive. All the organizations or enterprises have the capability to afford this type of storages in their business for storing the data. Moreover, due to this low cost, the business processes or business operations become cost effective and thus the annual cost or annual revenue is reduced to a great extent.
Disaster Recovery: Another important advantage of the cloud based storage is the presence of a disaster recovery plan. DR is a collection of various policies, processes and tools for enabling the recovery of the most significant systems and infrastructure that is caused either due to natural disasters or due to human made issues (Yang and Jia 2014). This can also be defined as the subset of business continuation or business processes. There is always a high chance in any business to face such dangerous situations, where the data could be lost completely. Te main issue here is that if the data is lost, the organization would be losing the important factors and thus disaster recovery is very important. Cloud storage has this type of storage within the storage and thus if any issue arises, they have the capability to fight against it.
Cloud based storage has various benefits or advantages. These benefits are required for the clients to gain extreme popularity and profit. The data access and retrieval is easily done with the help of cloud storage. However, in spite of all these advantages, the cloud based storage comprises of various disadvantages as well (Yang and Jia 2014). These disadvantages often become very problematic for the clients as they do not have the idea to deal with these problems. Following are the most significant disadvantages of the cloud based storages.
- i) Security: One of the most vulnerable threat or risk in cloud storage is the security and privacy. This lack of privacy and security often becomes extremely threatening for the users to utilize the storage as there is a chance that the data would be lost completely and cannot be recovered (Yang and Jia 2014). Although the cloud storage comprises of a DR plan within it, this chance of data loss is always present with it.
- ii) Internet Dependency: The second vulnerable drawback of this cloud based storage is its Internet dependency. Any cloud operation can be executed only with the help of Internet connection. Due to this dependency on the Internet connection, extremely smaller organizations are unable to afford and access this storage . There is always a constant requirement of Internet connection for executing any particular process or procedure within the cloud.
Issues, Various Points of View
Bandwidth: Restriction in the bandwidth allowance is the next major disadvantage of cloud storage. Various services and different cloud storages have separate allowance for bandwidth (Li et al. 2013). When any particular user crosses that restriction in the bandwidth allowance, it is evident that more expense is required.
Availability of Software: The last disadvantage of any cloud based storage is the constant availability of services and software. When the services and software are not present constantly, it is not possible to complete the data storage within the cloud.
Observations have been taken from the above report that cloud based storages are very important for the storage of any type of data. The references and the bibliography consist of the twelve best articles. These articles have helped to make the topic absolutely clear. The report also has a detailed research on the given topic of cloud based storage and its advantages and disadvantages.
Conclusion
Therefore, from the above discussion it can be concluded that cloud based storage is significant requirement for any type of data storage. It solely stores all types of data or any confidential information. The most interesting fact about this cloud storage is that an in built disaster recovery plan is present within it. This helps the cloud based storage to gain popularity and become acceptable by all the users. There are various significant advantages and disadvantages in this cloud storage. These advantages and disadvantages are very vital information for any user as it helps them to understand whether they should take up cloud storage for their business or not. The above report has provided a brief understanding about the cloud based storage and its benefits and issues. The research is done by reviewing various articles. After evaluating all the articles, the conclusion is drawn that cloud storage is helpful for all.
References
Fernando, N., Loke, S.W. and Rahayu, W., 2013. Mobile cloud computing: A survey. Future generation computer systems, 29(1), pp.84-106.
Li, Z., Wilson, C., Jiang, Z., Liu, Y., Zhao, B.Y., Jin, C., Zhang, Z.L. and Dai, Y., 2013, December. Efficient batched synchronization in dropbox-like cloud storage services. In ACM/IFIP/USENIX International Conference on Distributed Systems Platforms and Open Distributed Processing (pp. 307-327). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.
Stanek, J., Sorniotti, A., Androulaki, E. and Kencl, L., 2014, March. A secure data deduplication scheme for cloud storage. In International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security (pp. 99-118). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.
Stefanov, E. and Shi, E., 2013, May. Oblivistore: High performance oblivious cloud storage. In Security and Privacy (SP), 2013 IEEE Symposium on (pp. 253-267). IEEE.
Terry, D.B., Prabhakaran, V., Kotla, R., Balakrishnan, M., Aguilera, M.K. and Abu-Libdeh, H., 2013, November. Consistency-based service level agreements for cloud storage. In Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (pp. 309-324). ACM.
Yang, K. and Jia, X., 2014. DAC-MACS: Effective data access control for multi-authority cloud storage systems. In Security for Cloud Storage Systems (pp. 59-83). Springer, New York, NY.
Goyal, S., 2014. Public vs private vs hybrid vs community-cloud computing: A critical review. International Journal of Computer Network and Information Security, 6(3), p.20.
Lee, G., 2014. Cloud networking: understanding cloud-based data center networks. Morgan Kaufmann.
Ren, Y.J., Shen, J., Wang, J., Han, J. and Lee, S.Y., 2015. Mutual verifiable provable data auditing in public cloud storage. ????????, 16(2), pp.317-323.
Rountree, D. and Castrillo, I., 2013. The basics of cloud computing: Understanding the fundamentals of cloud computing in theory and practice. Newnes.
Wang, C., Chow, S.S., Wang, Q., Ren, K. and Lou, W., 2013. Privacy-preserving public auditing for secure cloud storage. IEEE transactions on computers, 62(2), pp.362-375.
Yang, K. and Jia, X., 2013. An efficient and secure dynamic auditing protocol for data storage in cloud computing. IEEE transactions on parallel and distributed systems, 24(9), pp.1717-1726.