business

When you see credit card services being hacked, you have to ask if you want all your company data available to the same vulnerability. Cloud is good for non confidential data such as music, movie, pictures, and personal email, but not business, especially mission critical. A separate encryption software may get you some more security.

Always encrypt strongly BEFORE uploading to the cloud!

Note that IBM also offers a private cloud.

What makes us so sure that our own systems are all that secure? The points about security concerns in a cloud are well taken, public or private (a distinction I find rather fake). But, the ability of most in-house IT operations to be any more secure is equally suspect. All systems are vulnerable the moment they are hooked to the Internet.

As long as you have several backups cloud storage isn't that big of deal, storage has been usually cheap, with the exception of Thailand flooding last winter that shutdown many hard drive manufacturers which drove prices up temporarily. But The only real advantage of cloud storage is less overheard, less people to pay to set it up and monitor, and less on the power bill to run backup servers etc. Sensitive data should always have the best security whether you trust the cloud or not.

If you don't know WHERE your data is, you only know what the salesman says.

The blame game: Does cloud storage result in data loss? My opinion is that if not used properly including ignoring best practices, any form of data storage medium or media could result or be blamed for data loss regardless of if public or private cloud. For some people they have lost data as a result of using cloud storage services just as other people have lost data or access to information on other storage mediums and solutions. For example, data has been lost on cloud, tape, Hard Disk Drives (HDDs), Solid State Devices (SSD), Hybrid HDDs (HHDD), RAID and non RAID, local and remote and even optical based storage systems large and small. In some cases, there have been errors or problems with the medium or media, in other cases storage systems have lost access to, or lost data due to hardware, firmware, software, or configuration including due to human error among other issues. You can read more related perspectives and comments here: http://storageioblog.com/?p=2170 Cheers gs Greg Schulz Author "Cloud and Virtual Data Storage Networking" (CRC Press)

The cloud is not gonna fly with anything heavier than completely public information... But, it was a nice try by the wireless data service companies who depend on data quantity to make gobs of money.

Is this a news article or an advertisement?

All these guys have is just another data storage application (probably using the iSCSI Kernel) that is no more than a direct attached storage solution. A public cloud storage solution is not like throwing your data out and onto the web for everyone to see! Public clouds offer encrypted data security, 99.999% uptime, scaled management and now some applications offer agentless backup (I doubt sparkweave offers aggentless backup) where a organization can backup all mobile devices like smartphones, iPads, etc. Without seeing the product but knowing what the Intradyn solution is, I would bet Sparkweave offers little more than what is already available for any size data center. Good luck Sparkweave. There is a light at the end of your tunnel and it's the cloud computing/storage freight train! As far as cloud adoption. It's coming and once the learning curve and technology soap box preaching phase is done, cloud computing/storage will be adopted by everyone. Lots of enterprise data centers adopted this along time ago.