“There may be no place else to put all this big data except the cloud, if the sheer breadth of data continues to expand at the current rate.”

Indeed this reporter can remember not so long ago when a “terabyte” was considered a silly amount of information, certainly nothing anybody not working for Microsoft (News - Alert) or the CIA would need for their computing needs.

How times change. A friend of ours, a prominent music critic, recently told us that he owns a terabyte of Beatles music, studio outtakes, interviews and other media. Just Beatles. One cringes to imagine his Bob Dylan collection.

As industry observer Scott M. Fulton III notes the demand for storage outside the data center “may soon eclipse demand for storage inside it, if the latest four-year forecast by analyst firm IDC (News - Alert) proves accurate.”

Fulton refers to a report released by IDC's Vice President for storage systems Richard Villars which calculates that enterprises worldwide spent $3.3 billion for public cloud-based storage in 2010. It projects a compound annual growth rate of 28.9 percent for cloud storage from last year on to 2015.

That would put worldwide expenditures at $11.7 billion.

The report, Fulton said, projects such trends as enterprise storage hardware purchases will be driven by two relatively new packaging options, both of which concern private cloud architecture. Bundled storage with all-in-one "out-of-the-box solution" hardware, such as the database appliances we've seen announced by Oracle (News - Alert) earlier this month and HP and Microsoft soon afterward, will take root in more data centers.

IDC's Villars also projected expenditures by service providers on public cloud storage will grow from $3.8 billion in 2010 to $10.9 billion in 2015, at a CAGR of 23.6 percent, “so obviously IDC believes their margins will improve a bit as well.”

Recently, TMCnet reported cloud storage is one area of the cloud that is really gaining in strength, particularly as public, private and hybrid cloud storage options expand rapidly.

Simply put, cloud storage is a model in which data are stored online on multiple virtual servers, generally hosted by third parties, as opposed to dedicated servers. Cloud storage providers operate large data centers and people who would like to turn to the cloud for their storage needs may buy or lease storage capacity from them. Cloud storage services can be accessed through a Web-based user interface or a Web service application programming interface.

For those that are ready to say goodbye to on-site data centers and hello to cloud providers, they must also decide among the plethora of cloud storage options ranging from private to public to hybrid. But perhaps the biggest debate that exists today is between public and private cloud and which offers more benefits.