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Contributed Article By Jeff Bell, Director of Corporate Marketing at Zetta
2011 - Cloud Storage Adoption Driven By Solutions
2010 has brought some surprises in cloud storage adoption, and a recent survey we completed suggests trends for 2011. One strong indicator is a sharp uptick in the application specific use cases for cloud storage adoption as opposed to more general storage or "IaaS" use case.
In 2009 going into 2010, it looked like a growing awareness of affinity for cloud storage. Nearly half of the people we surveyed in 2009 indicated that they either already were using or would be using some type of cloud storage (47 percent). Although we fully expected some upwards movement in these numbers, by the end of 2010, that number had not changed significantly (percent).
What was surprising was the growth in the number of people that were considering specific applications including Business Continuity (33 percent year-over-year increase), Compliance (33- percent year- over-year increase) and Backup (8-percent year-over-year increase). That was offset by the number of respondents that were looking to cloud storage for more general purposes such as primary storage (a 28 -percent drop year-over-year) or storage bursting / temporary storage (6-percent drop year-over-year).
So what does it all mean?
- Cloud Storage Interest will Remain High: Cloud storage continues to garner significant interest with no letup from last year and even a slight uptick. With half of the users interested, there will be a lot of conversations and a lot of implementations in 2011.
- Cloud Storage Users and Prospects are More Knowledgeable: Test cases and proof points are becoming available and new customers can now see what has worked for others and what is likely to work for them.
- Data Protection will be a Hot Cloud Application: Enterprise data protection has some serious pain points, including cost-effectively offsiting your data. With the advent of enterprise-class cloud storage offerings, it will be possible to leverage the efficiencies of on-demand storage to provide this protection.
So what did it mean to Zetta?
During 2010, Zetta, following the lead of our customers, released a new service, Zetta Data Protect. Zetta Data Protect builds on top of the Zetta Enterprise Storage Service and provides a client-side agent, ZettaMirror, which automatically replicates and synchronizes client-side data into the Zetta Storage Cloud. This data is then versioned for seven years and made available, via standard remote file system interfaces, for immediate data access, providing an instantaneous restore to operation. A very large percentage of our new customers are opting for the Zetta Data Protect service as a way to solve an immediate pain point with an easy-to-implement offsite data protection solution.
About the Author
Jeff Bell runs corporate marketing for Zetta including branding, public relations, corporate communications and lead generation. Prior to Zetta, he was VP of Marketing at Pivot3 launching them into market with an award-winning, revenue-producing new product category. Before that, as VP of marketing at Pillar Data Systems, he helped achieve the largest first year storage company revenue. As VP and GM of Unisys, he redefined and modernized the storage business, growing revenues and increasing gross margins.