Top Cloud Storage Providers In The Enterprise Market
Cloud backup is an essential part of a disaster recovery/business continuity (DR/BC) plan. It is important that enterprise data is securely backed up and easily accessible. In a previous article, I reviewed the top players in the consumer market for cloud storage. In this post, I will review the top five players in the enterprise market for cloud storage.
1. Box
When it comes to enterprise storage, Box are king. They are reported to have 120,000 enterprise customers, including 410 Fortune 500 companies. They have a very simple and intuitive interface that makes it easy to share and access files. The pricing is a little expensive, starting at $15/month/user, but the service comes with a range of tools, such as Salesforce integration and an admin console for effective management of users.
2. Amazon S3
Amazon S3 provides a way for enterprises to store large volumes of data at an affordable price, from as low as $0.125/GB/month. While S3 doesn’t provide many of the front-end functionalities of Box and cannot be directly used for file sharing the way you do with Box or Dropbox, it forms the backbone of many data-centric applications on the Internet, such as the cloud applications from 37 Signals.
3. Jungle disk
Jungle disk provides a simple interface that uses Rackspace Cloud and Amazon S3 as backend storage. By focusing on the interface and using trusted storage providers underneath, Jungle disk provides users with a greater level of control over their backup. The pricing starts at $4/user/month, with a $0.15 GB cost for storage. They even let you use your own S3 storage account if you want.
4. Mozy from EMC
This is another popular storage service that is used by more than 80,000 enterprises and is offered by one of the leaders in the enterprise storage and virtualization market—EMC. Their plans start from $10/user for a 10 GB storage limit. Unlike Box or Jungle Disk, Mozy primarily focuses on the backup part rather than the file-sharing component. It supports both Windows and Mac machines.
5. Symantec Backup Exec Cloud
This is a backup system from the makers of Norton antivirus software; it allows you to backup Windows Servers and PCs, and the offering is primarily targeted at small business customers who use the Windows stack. The storage is brought in increments of 10 GB, and the pricing starts at $70/year for 10 GB of storage.
By Balaji Viswanathan
