Business Users Are Not Ready For Cloud Storage

There's been a lot of talk over the past year about moving data to the cloud, from storage vendors and IT professionals alike. Why? Given that data storage capacities are growing at 30% to 40% per year but storage budgets are flat or growing minimally, IT professionals are eager to take advantage of the low cost per gigabyte offered by cloud providers. Storage vendors are eager to be the ones to provide storage-as-a-service or supply storage systems to the cloud providers. However, data from Forrester's 2009 hardware survey shows that this is just talk, so far. Respondents in all geographies and of all company sizes appear to have little interest in moving their data to the cloud any time soon. There is long-term potential for storage-as-a-service, but Forrester sees issues with guaranteed service levels, security, chain of custody, shared tenancy, and long-term pricing as significant barriers that still need to be addressed before it takes off in any meaningful way.