Organizations need to improve storage agility so they can gain the full benefits of cloud computing. Before they can get there, a few hurdles must be cleared:

• Existing storage systems lack cloud storage features.
• Typical storage is inflexible and expensive.
• Cloud computing can increase data security exposures and reduce the ability to audit.

Cloud storage solutions from IBM tackle these challenges by enabling efficient virtualization and cloud-agile features, without a rip and replace of existing storage. These solutions can:

• Add cloud features to your storage environments, such as self-service automated provisioning, pay-per-use billing and storage service catalogs.
• Improve flexibility with storage virtualization, storage efficiency and self-optimizing storage that can reduce users' per terabyte cost of storage up to 50 percent.
• Improve cloud security by deploying encryption, multi-tenancy repositories and secure access control.

IBM SmartCloud Storage Products