Evolution of Cloud Storage as Cloud Computing Infrastructure Service

Enterprises are driving towards less cost, more availability, agility, managed risk all of which is accelerated towards Cloud Computing. Cloud is not a particular product, but a way of delivering IT services that are consumable on demand, elastic to scale up and down as needed, and follow a pay-for-usage model. Out of the three common types of cloud computing service models, Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is a service model that provides servers, computing power, network bandwidth and Storage capacity, as a service to their subscribers. Cloud can relate to many things but without the fundamental storage pieces, which is provided as a service namely Cloud Storage, none of the other applications is possible. This paper introduces Cloud Storage, which covers the key technologies in cloud computing and Cloud Storage, management insights about cloud computing, different types of cloud services, driving forces of cloud computing and cloud storage, advantages and challenges of cloud storage and concludes by pinpointing few challenges to be addressed by the cloud storage providers.