Most Not Interested in Cloud Data Storage

Another dose of reality for the Cloud Computing industry! A new survey by Forrester says that just 3% of companies use cloud storage. Worse, the vast majority of firms don’t plan to put data in the cloud. This is the latest shot of poor showings for the cloud, and I have a theory about it. But first, read on: Forrester interviewed more than 1,200 IT decision makers at enterprises and small and mid-size businesses in North America and Europe. The research company asked IT decision makers if they had plans to adopt cloud storage services such as those offered by Amazon S3, EMC Atmos, Nirvanix, The Planet, or AT&T.

·       43% said they’re not interested in cloud storage;
·       An equal proportion were interested but have no plans to adopt;
·       3% plan to implement a cloud storage platform in the next year;
·       5% plan on it a year from now or later;
·       And, while 3% have already switched to cloud storage, only 1% are expanding an existing implementation.

To me, this reflects issues and concerns that just won’t go away on the part of IT folks and end users, chief among them the need for assurances of guaranteed service levels and security.  Forrester agrees, according to a story about the survey in SF Gate:

Forrester analyst Andrew Reichman writes in the report that “there is long-term potential for storage-as-a-service, but Forrester sees issues with guaranteed service levels, security, chain of custody, shared tenancy, and long-term pricing as significant barriers that still need to be addressed before it takes off in any meaningful way.”

One interesting finding of the survey is that companies are more interested in the cloud for back-up storage rather than general purpose storage. Why is that?

“First, it’s s a complete service offering, not just CPU or storage capacity,” Reichman writes. “You get the backup software intelligence and storage capacity in a fully managed service. Second, it’s solving a very specific pain point – the pain of bringing a costly and error-prone, but very necessary, IT function under control. This is in contrast to storage-as-a-service offerings where the user has to figure out how to put it all together.”

I’ll put my theory about this finding out there, too.  I think that companies probably feel they’re taking less of a chance backing up data on the cloud – data they own and also have access to on internal servers. Perhaps this doesn’t require such a leap of faith as it does to migrate all your data to the cloud…with a fear that you can’t recoup any information that gets lost.

This is why companies that do use cloud data storage also take safeguards to ensure their data remains safe and accessible – such as cloud monitoring services.

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