These are many and varied but here is a general list of the accepted benefits:
- Companies need only pay for the storage they actually use, typically an average of consumption during a month. This does not mean that cloud storage is less expensive, only that it incurs operating expenses rather than capital expenses.
- Businesses using cloud storage can cut their energy consumption by up to 70% making them a more green business. Also the vendors are dealing with higher levels of energy and are better equipped to manage it – keeping costs down.
- Organisations can choose between off-premises and on-premises cloud storage options, or a mixture of the two options, depending on relevant criteria that is complementary to initial direct cost savings potential; for instance, continuity of operations, disaster recovery, security, and records retention laws, regulations, and policies.
- Storage availability and data protection is intrinsic to object storage architecture, so depending on the application, the additional technology, effort and cost to add availability and protection can be eliminated.
- Storage maintenance tasks, such as purchasing additional storage capacity, are offloaded to the responsibility of a service provider.
- Cloud storage provides users with immediate access to a broad range of resources and applications hosted in the infrastructure of another organisation via a web service interface.
- Cloud storage can be used for copying virtual machine images from the cloud to on-premises locations or to import a virtual machine image from an on-premises location to the cloud image library. In addition, cloud storage can be used to move virtual machine images between user accounts or between data centres.
- Cloud storage can be used as natural disaster proof backup, as normally there are 2 or 3 different backup servers located in different places.