A recent report by
Forrester's
Andrew Reichman titled
Business Users Are Not Ready For Cloud Storage: Current And Planned Adoption Of Storage-As-A-Service Is Minimal For Now paints a picture for cloud storage adoption, that at first blush, is not encouraging.
He states:
In Forrester's Enterprise And SMB Hardware Survey, North America And Europe, Q3 2009 survey, we asked businesses about their interest in "hosted storage capacity" offerings. Interest was minimal at best. Forty-three percent of all respondents said that they were simply not interested, and another 43% said that they were interested but had no plans to move forward.
While it could be argued that as a cloud storage supplier, I am necessarily bullish about the ultimate prospects, I believe the data is actually quite good and clearly represents what we are experiencing in the marketplace. Now,
Mezeo is engaged with many service providers, as well as the early adopters in the enterprise space as they begin their evaluations.
When I look at
enterprise cloud-storage adoption based on
Everett Rogers' diffusion curve I see a pretty
clear view of the typical market place approach to adoption of disruptive technologies: 
For new, emerging, and potentially disruptive technologies, we should look for what the
next practices are, i.e. the practices of
the innovators and early adopters. The survey reflects the typical technology adoption cycle and re enforces what we are experiencing in the market place.
11% of companies are taking the plunge - these are the
early adopters and
innovators. The
early majority (43%) is interested, and watching. The
late majority is not in the game, yet.
So we are on track. And to prove it, let's look at one of these enterprise-level innovato
rs: General Electric.
Acco
rding to
IBM storage expert
Tony Pearson,
GE has implemented
cloud-based backups and archive for GE Corp, NBC Universal
and GE Asset Management divisions running at only 32 cents per
GB/month, representing a 40-60 percent savings over their previous
methods. This includes backups of their external Web sites, archives of
their digital and production assets, RMAN backups including
development/staging databases. They plan to add out-of-region
compliance archive in 2010. They also plan to monetize their
intellectual property by offering "CloudStorage Manager" as a software offering for others.
There are other comments in the Forrester report that range from the usual concerns of
security and
multi-tenancy to a discussion around
lack of definition of use cases. While it is helpful to raise these typical concerns, they are not descriptive of our daily marketplace experience. Rather, they are more associated with what I call the
two pillars of cloud storage understanding. The two pillars are as follows:
If you share the
Pillar 1 view (and this is the case both in the enterprise and with many traditional storage suppliers), then the typical concerns may outweigh the advantages. However, consider
Pillar 2, which addresses new application enablement and new capabilities that enable security, multi-tenancy and use case definition (Pillar 1 concerns).
Pillar 2 represents a market maturity view that is shared by all of us, suppliers, service providers, and early adopters.Remember, cloud storage came about in the
IT Service Provider space, specifically as a source of storage for new applications being driven by hosted web applications. These applications are now extending into every facet of the information technology space, including IT service providers, the enterprise, SMB and consumer use cases.
You can no more dismiss cloud storage than you could SaaS or the web itself! 
