Storage as a Service

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What Does Storage as a Service Mean?

Storage as a service (SaaS) is a business model in which a company leases or rents its storage infrastructure to another company or individuals to store data. Small companies and individuals often find this to be a convenient methodology for managing backups, and providing cost savings in personnel, hardware and physical space.

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A company providing SaaS may be called a storage service provider (SSP). Storage as a service can also be referred to as hosted storage.

Techopedia Explains Storage as a Service

As an alternative to storing magnetic tapes offsite in a vault, IT administrators are meeting their storage and backup needs by service level agreements (SLAs) with an SaaS provider, usually on a cost-per-gigabyte-stored and cost-per-data-transferred basis. The client transfers the data meant for storage to the service provider on a set schedule over the SaaS provider’s wide area network or over the Internet. The storage provider provides the client with the software required to access their stored data. Clients use the software to perform standard tasks associated with storage, including data transfers and data backups. Corrupted or lost company data can easily be restored.

Storage as a service is prevalent among small to mid-sized businesses, as no initial budget is required to set up hard drives, servers and IT staff. SaaS is also marketed as an excellent technique to mitigate risks in disaster recovery by providing long-term data storage and enhancing business stability.

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Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist
Margaret Rouse
Technology Specialist

Margaret is an award-winning writer and educator known for her ability to explain complex technical topics to a non-technical business audience. Over the past twenty years, her IT definitions have been published by Que in an encyclopedia of technology terms and cited in articles in the New York Times, Time Magazine, USA Today, ZDNet, PC Magazine, and Discovery Magazine. She joined Techopedia in 2011. Margaret’s idea of ​​a fun day is to help IT and business professionals to learn to speak each other’s highly specialized languages.