The cloud storage market is hot: IDC (News - Alert) is projecting that the market for public and private cloud storage will be in excess of $22 billion by 2015. The recent boom of cloud storage offerings evidences this growth trend.

Companies are turning to cloud storage for the economic advantage of utility storage instead of the higher capital and operational costs of building and managing remote data centers. Likewise, consumers are resourcing services like Amazon, Dropbox (News - Alert), iCloud and Box for their cloud storage needs – and the competition is fierce.

Box recently offered Android (News - Alert) users who sign up for a Box account 50 GB of cloud storage for free. The company sees Android as its biggest room for growth, and says “it will do everything it can to make sure the experience is streamlined across all iterations of the Google (News - Alert) platform,” Slash Gear recently reported.

Over the past several years, cloud storage companies have undertaken massive storage buildouts as they have expanded their service offerings, entered new markets, and extended their geographic reach, according to the IDC.

Based on the growth of data, organizations will continue to demand access to low-cost storage capacity. Businesses and consumers alike are realizing is that with such vast amounts of data to store – whether for operational or compliance needs – the status quo of yesterday’s storage model unsuitable and inefficient.

Another example of growth in the market can also been seen in cloud storage provider StorSimple, which recently announced that it was selected to provide hardware solutions to the Microsoft (News - Alert) Technology Center (MTC).

MTC is just one of a number of companies that have latched on to using StorSimple. Back in October, MedPlast, a company that provides thermoplastic medical devices, realized the benefits of moving their data to the cloud through StorSimple.

StorSimple’s cloud storage also offers pre-configured, optimized volumes for Windows File Shares, VMware libraries, SharePoint Content, Log files or databases and exchange. The company is also renowned for being the first and only cloud storage solution certified for Windows Server 2008 R2. It’s also the first and only cloud storage solution to be VMware Ready certified.