Enterprise Storage

The book I read to research this post was Rethinking Enterprise Storage by Marc Farley which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. Note I think this book was free. It is also around 150 pages so is a reasonable length and Marc works for Microsoft so the book tends to be about Windows Azure Storage. Legally a company has to store things like e-mails in case of litigation and until recently many companies thought they were better off not using the cloud for this purpose and used either off-site servers or tape drives. A fairly recent development has been CiS or cloud integrated storage which is where storage software is provided as well as a cloud storage service and with broadband going forward with leaps and bounds with access speed it makes it a viable option. Cloud Computing is where instead of using a server and maybe software etc it is all provided over the internet so you have a virtual machine maintained and regularly upgraded by the cloud provider and merely have to access it on a machine at your company or home. Hybrid Company is even newer and is where maybe software is provided and you can run that your machine in your workplace and that works in conjunction with the cloud service so the might provide storage etc. It's worth noting often versions of these cloud services are provided in a basic version free of charge with a premium version you can upgrade to and pay for. So you can save a lot of money. This book tells you all about the Microsoft products although I think it's a shame it doesn't give you some idea how it compares to Amazon Web Services and what they offer. Also some like healthcare providers might find this kind of service unsuitable as they have to follow more stringent guidelines about things like information disclosure and could be sued if they use a cloud service that might not have to follow the same strict rules. The rules aren't as strict for companies. I did really enjoy this book and think it is well written. Finally the book does delve a little into all the data collected on social media sites like Facebook and how that is potentially providing companies with huge amounts of data about there products which is still in its infancy but the marketing opportunities for companies are huge.