Cloud computing is now playing a very critical role in the supporting and promotion of African businesses. There has been a paradigm shift from how businesses used to store huge amounts of data in huge files of paperwork to how the inception of cloud computing is now redefining data storage.
Cloud computing is a general term for the delivery of hosted services over the Internet. Therefore, cloud storage is a cloud computing model in which data is stored on remote servers accessed from the Internet, or “cloud.” It is maintained, operated and managed by a cloud storage service providers like Liquid Telecom on robust storage servers that are built on visualization techniques.
The costs of constructing physical server rooms for local data storage is very much unbearable for small to medium African businesses. However, the emergence of cloud computing services will now allow SMEs to store data in already established virtualized data centre infrastructures at very affordable costs.
Liquid Telecom has already partnered Microsoft to offer Cloud Services to Africa’s small to medium enterprises
Cloud computing enables companies to consume a computer resource, such as a virtual machine (VM), storage or an application, as a utility just like electricity rather than having to build and maintain computing infrastructures in house.
Cloud storage works through data center virtualization, providing end users and applications with a virtual storage architecture that is scalable according to application requirements.
In general, cloud storage operates through a web-based Application Programming Interface (API) that is remotely implemented through its interaction with the client application’s in-house cloud storage infrastructure for input/output (I/O) and read/write (R/W) operations.
When delivered through a public service provider, cloud storage is known as utility storage. Private cloud storage provides the same scalability, flexibility and storage mechanism with restricted or non-public access.
Cloud computing boasts several attractive benefits for businesses and end users. Five of the main benefits of cloud computing are going to be discussed in our tomorrow’s Tech bulletin.
