What is cloud native storage?

Cloud-native storage provides infrastructure that allows your application to scale with ease in both performance and capacity. It ensures that you’re equipped to handle whatever your business throws at it today and tomorrow. By maximising storage efficiency, cloud-native storage eliminates the redundancy of repetitive tasks and allows the growth of your business without significant investments in hardware or personnel. If you’re interested in learning more about cloud-native storage, keep reading!

What is Cloud-Native Storage?

The cloud is so prevalent in today’s day and age that it is crucial to know how it works. But, before you can harness its power, you need to understand what cloud-native storage is in the context of digitalisation. Cloud-native storage is essentially a way to develop and operate specific software applications such as cloud computing, microservices, serverless, containerisation, and more trends in the technology space. Cloud-native storage is a technologically advanced storage solution designed to be used in a cloud-native environment. This type of storage provides a simple and cost-effective way to manage data for applications. Most solutions use the tools and environments determined by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

Key Features of Cloud Native Storage

Cloud-native storage has several features that separate it from traditional disk-based storage. At its core, cloud-native storage services are built with scalable, redundant architecture. These systems are often deployed across multiple regions to ensure businesses can access data virtually anywhere. Additionally, cloud-native storage services offer varying degrees of auto-scaling for fast performance and instant recovery when necessary. Adopting a cloud-first strategy is important to improve efficiency through workflow automation and nurture a high-performance culture by realising your OKR and KPI goals.

Let’s take a deeper look at some of the top features of cloud-native storage:

• Scalability – Businesses are growing in complexity. Organisations of all sizes demand cost-effective storage solutions and cloud-native storage to reduce costs and free up staff from mundane tasks such as backups and maintenance. The scalability provided by cloud-native storage allows businesses to meet user demand with agile workflows for better performance, faster data analysis and instant access to critical business information stored in an organisation’s network environment—all with a minimised IT footprint. Tessaract offers enterprise-class scalability (enterprise workflow automation) and simplicity for cloud-native applications running on Windows, Linux or Microsoft Azure environments. By consolidating backup workloads into a single solution, Tessaract can help dramatically reduce overall spending without sacrificing efficiency or control of your business data environment.
• High Availability – When cloud-native storage refers to high availability, it means that at any given moment, data will be available from multiple zones of storage. This alleviates you from a single point of failure, meaning in case one system breaks down or is unresponsive for any reason, another system elsewhere will be standing by to pick up its load. Your files are always accessible and safe.
• Vendor Neutrality – A cloud-native storage solution allows storing data in a vendor-neutral environment instead of forcing users to rely on their hardware. Whether your company uses Windows or Macs, you will want cloud-native storage. Tessaract’s suite of software is designed to integrate with virtually any operating system seamlessly. If you choose Tessaract for cloud-native storage, your business can focus on growth rather than worrying about infrastructure issues with a cloud strategy that prioritises being cloud-smart.
• Security – If you plan to use cloud-native storage, security should be one of your top concerns. Unlike local storage, cloud storage services are neutral regarding data security. Because they are not responsible for protecting customer data, they have very few protective layers. Security tools and policies should be handled in-house—but with most businesses already struggling to find IT resources, security tends to fall by the wayside once again.
• Resiliency – Today’s cloud-native storage systems are built with resiliency. They often feature redundant arrays of independent storage (RAID) to ensure that data remains available and safe in a physical storage device failure. High-availability features enable businesses to continue working even when a part of their infrastructure fails, keeping applications running smoothly and eliminating downtime. Dedicated cloud service providers like AWS, Azure, Google and Alibaba offer storage solutions that optimise performance and security.
• Manageability – Manageability refers to properties that make cloud-native storage systems easier to deploy and manage in production. Traditional storage systems have limited their ability to meet modern business needs while incurring significantly higher operating costs over time, so cloud-native is a better option.
• Observability – Data storage in a cloud-native environment necessitates a high level of visibility into what’s going on. Observability metrics can reveal important information about how cloud-native applications behave and whether any performance issues need to be addressed.
• Declarative Deployment – Instead of adopting a traditional, imperative approach to orchestrating application containers, cloud-native storage solutions such as Tessaract leverage declarative models to define what applications will be deployed and how they’ll be managed.
• API-Based Automation – Tessaract’s API-based automation enables seamless integration with cloud-native storage. It can be used to automate more of your business’ back-end processes, allowing you to save time and effort.

Common Cloud-Native Storage Solution Models

The cloud-native storage model involves a software-defined storage solution on top of an object storage platform (OSS) or block storage platform. Software-defined means an orchestration layer provides standard tools and management interfaces to abstract away underlying infrastructure differences, enabling you to deploy multiple cloud-native storage solutions simultaneously. The most prominent example of a popular cloud-native orchestration framework is Kubernetes, which allows companies like Tessaract to provide customers with automation solutions that can be deployed on top of any Kubernetes cluster. Getting native support for Amazon S3 buckets enables you to easily store and retrieve massive amounts of data without setting up an entire enterprise file system. Other forms of cloud storage solutions include multi-cloud vs hybrid cloud or on-premise vs cloud.

How Tessaract Can Help

Tessaract integrates with Google Cloud and AWS to set up, configure, and manage a cloud-native storage solution. Tessaract comes with powerful corporate tools such as digital signing and client onboarding that let you deploy a cloud storage solution in minutes. It provides automated backup, replication and continuous archiving of all your critical data from primary data centres to remote sites, offices or third-party cloud providers. Power your business with Tessaract's digital workflows for cloud-native storage architecture to help with your business needs and digital acceleration. Contact us today to request your demo and start your digital transformation journey!