Buck Woody discusses in this article data ingress and storage access in Cloud Computing reference architecture. He explains how to create a centralized, off-premises (cloud-based) data store that provides flexibility, security, consistency, and guards against vendor lock-in. Buck is Senior Technical Specialist on Windows Azure at Microsoft and the examples he presents are based on a Windows Azure solution, but the concepts introduced can be applied to other Cloud storage solutions as well. His conclusion is that “The key is to think about the data first—what it shape is, its security requirements, consistency model, and other factors. It’s all about flexibility and options.”
