Why hybrid storage - or on-prem servers - beat the cloud

According to the hype, cloud services will be a panacea for businesses, providing all of the software, data access, and management needed by modern enterprises while shedding the hands-on maintenance and expense of on-premise servers.

Cloud services have their merits, especially for big corporations spending seven-figure IT budgets to support huge data and SaaS needs. However, for small and mid-sized businesses, migrating to a hybrid cloud solution – or simply sticking to on-premise servers – offers a better fit.

That’s the message coming back to Micron from its channel partners. That’s also why those businesses are saving costs and retaining control of their data and software with Micron memory and storage for on-premise servers. If your business is weighing options for data and software management, here’s a few factors to consider to get the most out of your IT budget.

Data centers supporting the cloud offer quantity over quality. Their business customers can store as much data as needed, with costs rising to match. This offers advantages in that cloud services can scale over time, but it does not mean the most commonly accessed databases respond to queries the fastest. In short, cloud services don’t offer speed where you need it. That makes for an inefficient user experience for your customers or employees querying the system thousands or millions of times. Storing critical data in upgraded, on-premise servers affordably solves the problem.

The difference boils down to hardware. Many data farms use hard disk drives in their servers, which offer suitable capacity but aren’t up to the task when it comes to speed. Solid state drives are far faster, depending on the product. The Micron 5300 SSD, for example, performs up to 19 times more database operations per second, more than twice as many HDDs, making that and other SSDs a superior option for demanding workloads, such as Cassandra NoSQL. For businesses supporting those types of operations, storing high-use data on-site in enterprise SSDs makes sense, regardless of whether that business chooses to store low-priority data off-site as part of a hybrid plan.

Data breaches are nightmares for the growing list of companies falling prey to hackers accessing customer data, engaging in corporate espionage, or holding businesses hostage with malicious software. That list isn’t getting any shorter. More than 3,800 breaches were reported halfway through 2019, according to a report from Risk Based Security. Those breaches, which included three of the 10 largest ever, were a 54 percent increase over the same period in 2018 and exposed more than four billion records.

Data breaches can result in regulatory fines, remediation expenses, and customers feeling betrayed and taking their business elsewhere. All of that adds up: the average data breach among those studied was nearly $4 million, according to IBM’s 2019 Cost of a Data Breach Report.

Companies entrusting third-party data centers forfeit their power to oversee cyber security. Many small and midsized companies opt to store important records, such as proprietary business documents and customer names, addresses and credit card numbers, on-premise where servers can be monitored and maintained. Those electing for hybrid solutions often keep their most sensitive data on-premise and within their control.

SSDs are critical to cybersecurity because they offer self-encryption. No firewall or cybersecurity software is perfect, so automatic encryption at the hardware level adds an important safeguard not offered by HDDs or cloud services relying on HDDs. Enterprise SSDs offer additional security layers. The Micron 5300, for example, provides several firmware-based security options, as well as power-loss protection for data at- rest and in-flight, as well as data path protection for user and meta data. Essentially, maintaining on-premise enterprise SSDs gives your IT staff additional tools to safeguard critical company and customer data.

Many IT department managers feel like they are asked to accomplish much with meager budgets. Your company has already purchased its on-premise servers. Abandoning them to move to the cloud would waste investment in servers that are likely perfectly fine by upgrading storage and memory at a fraction of the cost of either buying new servers or completely migrating to the cloud.

A small investment in on-premise hardware meshes well with hybrid solutions: Upgrade on-site hardware. Limit costs of third-party storage. Scale either or both as needed, all while boosting speed and maintaining control of your most used and sensitive data. Considering those upgrades will provide faster access to your most accessed files while bolstering cybersecurity at the hardware level, it’s worth evaluating an on-premise or hybrid solution rather than assuming that migrating to the cloud is guaranteed to live up to the hype.