Trends in MIS: Cloud-based data storage
Every second of every day more than 24,000 gigabytes of data are uploaded to the internet. A single minute into your time spent reading this blog, people will have uploaded more than 31.25 million messages on Facebook, over 300,000 tweets on Twitter, and more than 48,000 photos on Instagram. A recent report by Cisco, estimates that “it would take more than 5 million years to watch the amount of video that will cross global IP networks each month in 2021.”
Beyond user-generated data, companies store massive amounts of information including documents, presentations, audio files, graphics and more.
In a highly digital world where creating and consuming vast amounts of data is essential, the need to safely store and preserve that data has become an increasing concern for many corporations and their IT professionals. As a result, cloud-based data storage has emerged with greater pace of adoption than most could have anticipated.
According to a recent McAfee survey, 93 percent of organizations are currently using some type of cloud services, with cloud spending estimated to account for 80 percent of the IT budget near term. This finding is also in line with recent IDC forecast, which predicts that as cloud storage solutions continue to replace traditional-onsite hardware-centric storage, cloud deployments will account for majority of spending on IT infrastructure.
Initially, many companies hesitated with adopting cloud storage due to security concerns associated with sensitive data. However, data security has become a core competency of many cloud providers. Now, it is precisely this concern that has fueled many organizations toward cloud-based storage.
Today, there are three cloud types: public, private and hybrid.
Public clouds are operated by third-party cloud service providers and delivered over the Internet. In a public cloud, hardware, storage and network devises are shared among various organizations who are using a particular service provider. In contrast, private cloud is used exclusively by a single business or organization. The physical location may vary, but the services and infrastructure are always maintained on a private network. Lastly, a hybrid cloud is a combination of the two. Therefore, it uses a mix of private cloud and public cloud services.
At William Woods University, students who are pursuing a bachelor of science in management information systems will learn how to evaluate various cloud-based solutions, make recommendations based on the needs of their organization, and then lead the adoption of these technologies. Such skills have contributed to an outstanding job placement rate for this program — nearly 100 percent.