Cloud Storage: Popular with SMBs, Ignored by Corporate Giants

A couple of recent surveys show a split in thinking among companies about migrating to Cloud Computing.  Small and Medium sized companies are moving towards the cloud at a rapid clip, but much larget companies are much more risk adverse towards using the public cloud.

The Spiceworks survey found that 28 percent of Small and Medium Sized companies are using the public cloud, and that the current rate of adoption is so high that by the end of the next six months 42 percent of SMBs will be using the Cloud.  The report quotes Cisco vice president of small business technology Susan Scheer Aoki as saying “The cloud has enabled a lot of new technologies and capabilities that can be delivered to small business at a price point that makes sense for them.”

A similar report by Microsoft also found that about 29 percent of SMBs are using the public cloud for at least one service, but they predict a slower growth rate, and don’t expect the rate of cloud usage by SMBs to reach 40 percent until 2014.  Marco Limena, vice president of Business Channels at Microsoft, said that “Cloud adoption will be gradual, and SMBs will continue to operate in a hybrid model with an increasing blend between off-premises and traditional on-premises infrastructure, for the foreseeable future “.

Given the background of hype around the cloud and reports like these from Microsoft and Spiceworks, it comes as a bit of a surprise to see a different set of conclusions announced by the research group called theInfoPro.  The report survey 247 Fortune 1000 companies and found that 87 percent did not even consider the public cloud as a viable option for them for data storage, not even for low level data backups and archival.

Marco Coulter, managing director of theInfoPro, said that “it doesn’t make sense to separate their computers and storage, and have the computers internally and storage externally.  Even for archiving data they were concerned they couldn’t retrieve their data in time… The problem is when you need the data back … there isn’t a high level of confidence that they can do that through an external system.”

One of the survey respondents wrote that their  “archive is tape. I don’t think we’ll be able to take advantage of the cloud.  The cost (of cloud storage) seems to keep going up. We priced Amazon, and the cost to send the data there and maintain it over time was less than putting up a new silo internally.”

InformationWeek speculated that this lack of interest in storage as a service by large companies is what prompted vendors like Iron Mountain, EMC, and Vaultscape to recently shut down their cloud operations.