Cloud Storage as the Infrastructure of Cloud Computing

As an emerging technology and business paradigm, Cloud Computing has taken commercial computing by storm. Cloud computing platforms provide easy access to a company´s high-performance computing and storage infrastructure through web services. With cloud computing, the aim is to hide the complexity of IT infrastructure management from its users. At the same time, cloud computing platforms provide massive scalability, 99.999% reliability, high performance, and specifiable configurability. These capabilities are provided at relatively low costs compared to dedicated infrastructures. This article gives a quick introduction to cloud storage. It covers the key technologies in Cloud Computing and Cloud Storage, several different types of clouds services, and describes the advantages and challenges of Cloud Storage after the introduction of the Cloud Storage reference model.