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Looking Back at Cloud Storage's Surprisingly Strong 2011

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January 10, 2012

Looking Back at Cloud Storage's Surprisingly Strong 2011

By David Sims, TMCnet Contributing Editor


Yearly reviews are all the rage this time of year, as are New Year’s resolutions. Frankly the reviews often turn out to be the more useful.

Contributing to the genre, Network Computing’s Sharon Fisher wrote a yearly wrap-up concentrating on cloud storage's silver lining.


And it was quite a silver lining indeed. Techaisle, an SMB-focused research firm cited by Fisher, reported that "SMBs globally spent $11 billion on cloud computing in 2011, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 12 percent until 2015.”

Many other technologies would have given their eye-teeth for cloud storage’s problems. As Fisher notes, cloud storage was one of the few technologies that could count itself successful in 2011 – “numerous IT organizations, facing data growth due to factors such as the requirement to keep data for electronic discovery purposes, found themselves with growing storage requirements yet smaller budgets.”

Okay, lots of industries probably could have found themselves in a position to do well. But as Fisher explains, cloud storage systems and services were seen as a genuine help in 2011’s weird economics, since it allowed users to fund growth “using operational expenditure funding, rather than having to make capital expenditures in the hardware, software and people required to run one's own data center.”

When times are tough hosted functions look a lot more appealing to cash-strapped organizations not interested in shelling out big bucks to install a bunch of hardware and hire a lot of people they might not need. Cloud storage became attractive for the ability to ramp up quickly with little capital expenditure.

During 2011, Fisher wrote, many services started offering cloud storage ranging from the consumer to the large organization, noting that such services as Box, Mozy, DropBox and Amazon's Elastic Cloud all saw strong uptake, particularly from small businesses. She quoted Charles King, principal analyst, Pund-IT, saying "This is no surprise because the tangible cost benefits of cloud computing are just what the doctor ordered for SMBs struggling with a tight economy and steadily rising IT expenses.”

Fisher quotes Dick Csaplar, senior research analyst, virtualization and storage, for the Aberdeen (News - Alert) Group, who wrote in his November 2011 report titled “How Much of Your Data Should be in the Public Cloud?” that data is growing 32 percent. Meanwhile, Fisher said, “15 percent of companies in a June study reported their data growing between 80 percent and 100 percent annually.”

She noted that one pressure driving businesses to cloud storage over 2011 was the escalating cost of IT infrastructure – something that didn’t rate at the top of many companies’ spend priority lists – “71 percent of large enterprises reported this pressure, making this the most significant pressure affecting that segment of the market,” she wrote, citing Csaplar’s research.

Will cloud storage continue its impressive run through 2012? Wait and see.

Want to learn more about cloud communications? Then be sure to attend the Cloud Communications Expo, collocated with TMC’s ITEXPO East 2012taking place Jan. 31-Feb. 3 2012, in Miami, FL. The Cloud Communications Expo will address a growing need of businesses to integrate and leverage cloud based communications applications, process enhancement techniques, and network based communications interfaces and architectures. To register, click here.

Stay in touch with everything happening at ITEXPO (News - Alert). Follow us on Twitter.


David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.

Edited by Carrie Schmelkin







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