Imagine you owned a house where you could add a new room every time you ran out of space. At first, that sounds great. But you also need to keep every room tidy and keep track of what stuff is in which rooms. To make things more complicated, you must make sure the stuff you use most often is in the rooms nearest you and move older, less-used stuff to more distant rooms.

You'll end up running around a lot, spending so much time and effort tidying rooms and moving stuff that you won't get anything else done! And to add to the pain, every room you add makes your house bigger, which pushes up your property rates and taxes; plus, you need to employ security that constantly patrols your rooms and checks for burglars.

Businesses have this problem with storing data. Every day, they record gigabytes of new information. A lot of that data is still crucial to business tasks or archived for specific reasons (such as tax compliance), so they keep adding hard drives for storage. They also want the right data closer to them, meaning faster storage. Thus they buy different types of drives and move the data around as needed. Then they have to invest in elaborate cybersecurity to keep it all safe.

But like our physical house, this approach has serious drawbacks. Unless the business has lots of money, it won't be able to keep adding more storage. Even if it can afford more storage, it has to wait for the new storage to be installed—likely adding much more storage that it needs (until that runs out, then it's back to square one). There is always the danger of drives failing catastrophically, destroying important data. Likewise, keeping cybercriminals away is very difficult and expensive if the business does everything on its own.

How do we fix this? Cloud storage

We all already use cloud storage. Whenever we save photos to Google Drive or keep emails in Office365's web client, we store data in the cloud. While those examples are fine for personal use and very small businesses, most companies need more than a Dropbox or OneDrive in the cloud. They need serious storage that they can expand or shrink on the fly, move data quickly, and keep things secure with the muscle of a major cloud provider.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is one of the world's leading cloud service providers and a giant for flexible and affordable storage. Products such as Elastic Block Storage (Amazon EBS) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) help thousands of companies store and manage their data, using just what they need and not paying for any unnecessary space (a feature called scaling storage).

This level of cloud storage has many benefits. It's much more secure, and flexible storage lets companies choose where to store data: some data might stay on a server in their offices while other data goes to live in the cloud.

AWS cloud storage is like a giant well-run warehouse next to your home. You get to store most (or all) of your stuff there. They keep the rooms tidy, and they can find something you want very quickly—faster than you ever could. In business terms, companies spend much less time looking for data or putting it somewhere. They can focus on using that data to create more services and products.

Turn to us 

Cloud storage, such as from AWS, is very powerful and offers different options. To find the best choices, talk to an AWS partner such as Vodacom Business and discover what cloud storage can do for your company. You never have to buy a hard drive for your business again!

Stop adding rooms to your data house—turn to AWS from Vodacom Business so that you can stop playing housekeeper and get back to business.