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Back to planet Earth?

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Back-to-planet-EarthBack to planet Earth?

There is a growing trend among businesses to leave cloud storage in favour of using locally based hardware data centres.

The reason is chiefly the cost largely because the storage space is rented from a cloud storage provider.

One US company quoted a boost in annual profits of £790,000 after leaving cloud-based storage.

But it is also about reliability: If a major data centre goes down, large parts of the web can go offline.

There may also be security concerns when using a cloud-based service which can be crucial to a company wanting to store sensitive information and protect it from competitors.

There is an initial outlay in buying the storage hardware, but if it is then shared with other businesses some of the costs can be recouped in rent.

It has been argued that using the cloud is faster, but that is only likely to be an issue for a huge multinational business.

The lesson is clear for smaller businesses; Do the research and find the most efficient, secure and cost-effective way to store your data.

Cloud-Storage

Where your documents are stored in the cloud is more important than you might think

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We perhaps all take for granted our use of the hardware and software, data centres and communications networks that power modern business.

But differences in the laws in Europe and the USA are becoming an increasing cause for concern across the EU.

It is all about who controls the data.

Europe is heavily dependent on US firms for cloud services.

There are laws in the EU (GDPR) and UK to protect the privacy of data. But in the USA, the intelligence and law-enforcement services broad powers to access data.

At the moment Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft and Google have a 65% share of the world cloud market between them.

But there are moves afoot to create what is being called Europe’s first “sovereign hyperscale cloud” thanks to €15m in seed funding and plans to build eight data centres in Europe in the next five years.

This will be managed by a Stockholm based company called Evroc.

There are 377 organisations participating in the Gaia-X project, which aims to join up cloud service providers in a federated system, so data can move between them while data owners remain in control.

Watch this space….