Storage as a Service (SaaS)

In the enterprise, SaaS vendors are targeting secondary storage applications by promoting SaaS as a convenient way to manage backups. The key advantage to SaaS in the enterprise is in cost savings -- in personnel, in hardware and in physical storage space. For instance, instead of maintaining a large tape library and arranging to vault (store) tapes offsite, a network administrator that used SaaS for backups could specify what data on the network should be backed up and how often it should be backed up. His company would sign a service level agreement (SLA) whereby the SaaS provider agreed to rent storage space on a cost-per-gigabyte-stored and cost-per-data-transfer basis and the company's data would be automatically transferred at the specified time over the storage provider's proprietary wide area network (WAN) or the Internet. If the company's data ever became corrupt or got lost, the network administrator could contact the SaaS provider and request a copy of the data.

Storage as a Service is generally seen as a good alternative for a small or mid-sized business that lacks the capital budget and/or technical personnel to implement and maintain their own storage infrastructure. SaaS is also being promoted as a way for all businesses to mitigate risks in disaster recovery, provide long-term retention for records and enhance both business continuity and availability.

SaaS also stands for Software as a Service.

Getting started with Storage as a Service

To explore how SaaS is used in the enterprise, here are some additional resources:

Storage at your service: Today, Storage as a Service is being driven by economic factors, as well as runaway data growth, compliance requirements, security issues and disaster recovery mandates.

Cleversafe's dsNEt helps ISPs launch DR service: Cleversafe's dsNet is the foundation of a new kind of online disaster recovery service that its designers say limit the impact of service provider outages.

Atempo, Nirvanix offer cloud-based file archiving: By teaming up with cloud storage startup Nirvanix, Atempo sees its Atempo Digital Archiving file archiving software become an integrated email and file archiving software product.

Proofpoint buys email archiving Storage as a Service provider Fortiva: Proofpoint is the latest security and storage vendor to fish from a teeming pond of smaller email archiving companies.

Learn more about Outsourced storage and storage service providers

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More resources from around the web: - Storage-as a service is proving increasingly popular as the recession bites businesses according to two new survery from IDC.

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