Chapter 6, “Data Storage in the Cloud,” will examine cloud-based data storage and database systems in detail. The chapter will also present several solution providers. For now, you should understand that companies can move their data storage to the cloud in a number of ways. One of the most innovative disk-storage solutions utilizes cloud-based network-attached storage (CloudNAS) devices, which present devices to users and applications as mountable drives and file systems. Normally, customers can scale their cloud-based storage on demand, paying only for the storage they consume.
As shown in FIGURE 4-12, some cloud-based network-attached storage devices provide behind-the-scenes data replication for data redundancy needs.