Supporting applications use case

If you are interested in this topic, you are most likely looking to fix the limitations, or enhance the capabilities, of what I call Invisible Applications. These are applications most people in an organization sometimes won't even know about the existence of until a disaster strikes, and at other times would be taken for granted. 

I am talking about the following, well-known services: 

• Backup and disaster recovery 
• File sharing 

As you can see, these are mainly storage related services, and so before we go on to see how the capability of these can be augmented and enhanced using the public cloud, let's take a look at the traditional way of performing these actions. 

Traditional operations 

Traditionally, there were three kinds of networked/centralized storage systems in an enterprise in addition to the directly attached storage that may have come with the servers:

• Storage Area Network (SAN) - block level storage 
• Network Attached Storage (NAS) - file level storage...