Softline IT is bringing a new service to market: storing data in "cloud storage". This was announced by the company's honorary president Anton Marrero on Tuesday, September 18, 2012. According to him, the company's customers now have the opportunity to optimize their costs and pay only for the amount of data center space they actually use. The bill for services does not include payments for renting a server whose full resources the customer usually does not need, or needs not constantly but only from time to time.
Since the service is provided under the "cloud" model, Softline IT customers do not need to purchase, support and maintain their own data storage infrastructure. "All backup and data integrity procedures are performed by Softline IT as the cloud data center provider," Anton Marrero noted during a presentation of the service for corporate customers.
Anton Marrero described the "Cloud Data Storage" service in detail. The idea is that data is stored on numerous servers distributed across the network. Unlike the model of storing data on one's own dedicated servers, purchased or rented specifically for such purposes, the number of servers and any internal structure are not visible to the customer. "Data is stored and processed in the so-called cloud, which from the customer's point of view is a single large virtual server. Physically, such servers may be geographically remote from each other, even located on different continents," says Anton Marrero.
During the presentation, the expert answered customers' main questions. They were most interested in security when storing and transferring data. This issue is especially relevant for confidential and private data. "All information is stored and transmitted in encrypted form, and the key is known only to the customer; even if the data center administrator wanted to, he would be unable to read the encrypted information," says Anton Marrero. All the more so since no one even knows exactly where the data is physically located, in Ukraine or, for example, in the USA.
To present the cloud to the customer more conveniently, Softline IT uses cloud gateways. With special software, the cloud storage appears to the customer as a local drive on their computer. And with a good, fast connection to the cloud, the customer may not even notice that they are working not with local data on their own computer but with data stored perhaps thousands of kilometers away.
However, as one of the customers rightly pointed out, overall performance when working with data in the cloud may for now be lower than when working with local copies of the data. The problem lies in the data transmission channels between the user and the cloud. For example, equipment at the customer's Internet provider may fail. "This is a global issue to which there is no definitive answer yet," says Anton Marrero. The quality of networks and data transfer speeds are growing every day, and very soon these problems will be a thing of the past. But even today, according to the expert, Softline IT specialists have not encountered a single failure while testing the service. "Clouds are the technology of the future. Tens of thousands of specialists are working to reduce the likelihood of any problems. I am sure that in just 5 years no one will be keeping data 'under the desk' at all. And I am glad that we are taking part in this process," Anton Marrero said, summing up the presentation.