Cloud Storage Gateways bridge on-premises systems with cloud storage, enabling seamless data transfer, backup, and disaster recovery. They are essential for businesses seeking scalable storage solutions.
Offering a range of capabilities like data deduplication and compression, Cloud Storage Gateways optimize bandwidth usage and storage efficiency. They provide secure and cost-effective solutions to extend on-premises storage to the cloud, ensuring data accessibility and reliability.
What are the critical features?Cloud Storage Gateways are widely implemented in industries requiring substantial data storage, such as healthcare, finance, and media. These industries benefit from the gateways' seamless integration with cloud platforms and enhanced data security.
This technology provides organizations with a reliable and efficient way to extend their storage capabilities to the cloud, ensuring data accessibility and reducing costs.
A cloud storage gateway, which can be implemented in either software or hardware, is a hybrid cloud storage device that serves as a bridge between local applications and remote cloud-based storage. A cloud storage gateway works through the translation of cloud storage application programming interfaces (APIs) to block-based storage protocols. The latter may include iSCSI or Fiber Channel. In addition to block-based storage protocols, a cloud storage gateway may also translate to file-based interfaces like server message blocks (SMBs), for example. All the data from cloud storage gateways is committed to the cloud for an authoritative copy in order to be sent to other locations. The gateways only keep hot data (data that needs to be accessed frequently) on premises in the cache.
Simply explained, how a cloud storage gateway works is that it allows incompatible technologies to communicate. The issue this technology solves is the incompatibility between protocols that are used for public cloud technologies and legacy storage systems. A cloud storage gateway resolves this through its protocol translation and ability to connect the technologies which are otherwise unable to do it on their own. When working with automated storage tiering, cloud storage gateways can also be used for archiving in the cloud.
When an individual or an organization has to deal with a large amount of information, they eventually encounter the issue of storage limitation. This usually happens with physical storage, which cannot be infinitely expanded. The benefit of cloud storage is that it allows users to store considerably large amounts of information without taking up space on a physical device. Different gateways have different storage limitations, but the common thing between all of them is that they can store your information in the cloud (online) without using up space on your computer or external hardware devices that you'd normally use for storage.
This is why in physical terms, cloud storage doesn't take up space. What does take up space is the program you can install on your device for storage. Different providers may offer the option for web-based cloud storage, which can also negate the need to install anything on your device, thus saving you even more space. In this way, users are able to store their files and data online, needing only an internet connection to upload and access it, without having to limit themselves to physical devices.
There are several advantages and disadvantages to cloud storage services. Benefits include:
When you use cloud storage gateways, some of the advantages of object storage are removed. These include:
Besides serving as a bridge between applications, there are different types of features that some cloud storage gateway products provide. These include services like:
