Object storage has become vital to data-hungry business operations

The pressing relevance of adopting dedicated storage technologies to organise unstructured data has been demonstrated by IBM's recent launch of Cloud Object Storage, following last year's acquisition of object storage provider Cleversafe.

That's according to Phil Bindley, CTO at The Bunker, who claimed that businesses have been sitting on a ticking data storage time bomb for some time as traditional strategy sees firms continue to add more trays to their tiered SAN arrays:

"Organisations are seeing exponential growth in file content and increasing data volumes from mobile applications, which means they cannot keep buying disc at the rate at which it's being consumed. Although the Public Cloud has long been acknowledged as the most scalable and cost-effective answer for tackling storage needs, fundamental flaws in terms of limited security and lack of the controls necessary for compliance and assurance mean businesses are reticent to entrust sensitive data to Cloud-based services."

Bindley continued: "A consolidated, hybrid storage solution that combines on-premise SAN with a single pool of highly secure, Cloud-based backup and archive data housed in UK data centres and allows IT staff to quickly and effectively access, retrieve and restore data will be essential. It also eliminates the risk of corruption of the data and disks, or obsolescence of tape storage media."

Bindley argues that in a world where companies depend on data analysis to make informed business decisions, storage solutions that don't support metadata – such as block-based storage – will restrict business efficiency and agility:

"Object storage allows extended metadata to be attached to each object, enabling search queries to interrogate all available data, not just a fraction of what is available. Most importantly, as businesses change and grow, storage technologies have to adapt to keep pace, scaling up and down on demand. Rather than get locked into a vendor or a costly service, a consumption model allows businesses to only pay for the data storage they use."