The benefits of a cloud gateway setup are compelling. Companies can avoid the logistics of housing massive quantities of data (e.g., power, cooling, floor space) while cloud storage providers offer low cost, fully managed, high-capacity repositories.

When talking about cloud storage in the context of cloud gateways, it could be in reference to either a public cloud or a private cloud. But for geographically separated tier-three/tier-four cloud services, the discussion almost always focuses on public cloud services. Gateway appliances could still play a role between private cloud data centers, but the use case is different.

For the purposes of this buyer’s checklist, we’ll focus on gateway functionality between corporate data centers and third-party cloud storage providers.