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The Cloud Chapter
6

“What’s your plan, Toshio?” Mateo Thomas, CEO of Falcon Security,
is meeting with Toshio Sato, IT director, and Joni Campbell, CFO, to discuss
Falcon Security’s data storage costs.
“Right now, Mateo, we’re fine. We just got our new NAS online, and we’ve
increased our storage capacity by almost 30 percent, but …” Toshio trails off.
Joni can’t stand this. “Well, we’re fine until you look at the bills we’re running
up. The money we’ve spent on storage has increased 350 percent in 1 year.”
“Yes, Joni, it has, but our volume’s gone up 400 percent,” Toshio replies.
“True enough, but …”
Mateo has had enough and interrupts. “We’ve been over this before. No
need to rehash it. We all agree that our storage costs are too high. Toshio, I’d
asked you to look into alternatives. What have you got?”
“The cloud.”
“The what?” Joni hopes he’s not losing it.
“The cloud,” Toshio repeats. “We move all of our video to the cloud.”
Mateo is curious. “OK, Toshio, I’ll bite. What’s the cloud?”
“It’s a movement—I’d call it a fad, except I think it’s here to stay.”
“So how does it help us?” Mateo asks.
“We lease storage capacity from a third party.”
Joni’s confused. “You mean we’d lease hard drives rather than buy them?”
“Well, not exactly,” Mateo explains. “We wouldn’t be installing any more
hard drives in our data center. We can lease online storage on very, very flexible,
pay-as-you-go terms. If we get a large new client, we can acquire more storage
and scale it to meet our needs.”