Moving to the Cloud

If you didn’t believe all the noise about cloud computing in the enterprise before, perhaps the latest news will help you change your thinking.

A new survey from Morgan Stanley reveals that 70% of CIOs questioned plan to move some, or all, of their infrastructure to the cloud in 2011. That’s almost twice as many as those who answered positively heading into 2010.

The 451 Group estimates that the cloud-computing market will grow to $16.7 billion in revenue by 2010, with a projected CAGR of 24% over the next three years.

The Revere Group predicts “consumers will also drive growth of this technology with their continued rapid adoption of smart-phones and tablets, which increasingly rely on cloud computing for their email and other application services.”

And that doesn’t even count Google’s forthcoming Chrome OS, which runs entirely in the cloud.

I’m proud to say that our data protection solution, ROBOBAK, have been at the forefront of this movement for many years. From our perspective, it simply makes sense, and has for quite a long time. If you’re a company with multiple locations, the ability to safeguard your data offsite is a virtual no-brainer. Depending on the sensitivity level of your data, you could store that data in a public cloud, a private cloud, or use a hybrid approach. In any of the three options above, your integrator/reseller/solution provider can help you figure out which is best for you.

This trend is only going to grow. Recent data from IDC shows we’re saving everything…because we can, and (in many cases) because the lawyers increasingly say we must. So we need a place to store the data that can easily grow with our rapidly changing requirements. That place, obviously, is in the cloud.

A couple of quick caveats: as you’re setting up your cloud storage infrastructure, make sure you work with your provider to establish an easy-to-follow and concise disaster recovery plan. The last thing you want is to suffer a data disaster, only to realize you’re not quite sure where it is or how to get it back. Also, make sure that you know what data you need protected and that these files are actually being backed up (See the following Blog piece from Dec 9, 2010 titled: [“Protecting what is near and dear to my wife, her pictures”] to find out how ROBOBAK template backups can help).

All off this is happening in the cloud. It’s a place where ROBOBAK has been for several years, and we’re pleased to see that the market is finally catching up.