Cloud Storage: Pie in the Sky?

By Greg McNevin

January 26, 2009: Similar to virtualisation, the enthusiasm behind cloud services is gaining steam by the day, particularly when it comes to storage-as-a-service. After all, why sink all that money into hardware and associated costs when you can just pay someone else for what you use? Well, according to Lenovo’s official blog, there are still many good reasons for keeping storage down to earth.

With Amazon’s S3 making waves for a variety of good and not so good reasons over the last year, and more cloud offerings coming online – possibly including the fabled Google drive– the discussion about cloud storage is starting to become a more mainstream debate in the tech world, and not a moment too soon.

The seemingly dominant idea at the moment is that the age of locally-stored data is drawing to a close, and it won’t be long until everyone is storing everything in the cloud and retrieving anything on the fly with a myriad of mobile devices. This will save money, increase productivity and ensure that everything you need is accessible at all times via an omnipresent, William Gibson-esque network.

However, while recognising the many benefits cloud storage offers - particularly given that Lenovo has recently launched its own Online Data Backup service – Matt Kohut, Lenovo’s Worldwide Competitive Analyst, believes that for now and the conceivable future, cloud storage is most definitely not going to replace local storage.

In the company’s Inside the Box blog Kohut points to the many unreliable, fly-by-night operators that have come and gone so far, the hours of productivity lost compared to the minutes of convenience gained, and how for every document the technology’s supporters have stored in the cloud, “there are two more that they would like to have access to that they haven’t yet uploaded or sync’d.”

But more importantly, beyond these issues there is the more important fact that cloud computing relies on what Kohut describes as “the holy triangle of cheap devices, pervasive connectivity, and copious bandwidth.” With smartphones in many pockets and netbook sales spinning out of control the device problem is more or less solved, however, the other two pieces of the puzzle are far being solved.

Of course, local storage is not without its own problems. Aside from setup and maintenance costs, the risks, particularly for small businesses, can be large.

“If you’re a smallish business, (below 250 seats) you probably don’t have an offsite backup strategy,” writes Kohut. “According to the National Archives & Records Administration in Washington, D.C., 93 percent of companies that lost their data centre for 10 days or more due to a disaster filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster.  Of those companies, 50 percent filed for bankruptcy immediately. A Price Waterhouse Coopers survey calculated that a single incident of data loss costs businesses an average of $10,000 [AU$15,500].”

So while cloud storage may not have us dumping our tapes and hard drives anytime soon, services like Lenovo’s, which are run by industry heavyweights like EMC and encrypt all data locally before being stored out in the ether, will help provide the best of both worlds and as Kohut says, enable IT administrators to “sleep soundly at night knowing that in the worst case, your data is locked away in some mountain in the clouds surviving all but a direct nuclear hit or your failure to pay your bill.”

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