Cloud computing is grabbing headlines as more and more enterprises are turning to this emerging technology as a way to enable flexible computing power over the Internet. In 2008, many companies were wary of the risks and vulnerabilities of participating in the cloud computing model, and although the buzz was high, adoption was feathered.

"This all changes in 2009," said Sajai Krishnan, CEO of cloud storage start-up ParaScale.  "The economic downturn and the addition of private cloud solutions to complement public offerings are creating an environment that enables incremental adoption of cloud storage on a very broad scale."

In discussions with end users, ParaScale has found that the overwhelming majority indicate they are considering both public and private cloud storage.

Storage Clouds are Attractive for Many Companies

Krishnan identifies several considerations driving the adoption of storage clouds.  These include:

• Building storage clouds is becoming as simple as installing a new application on your laptop.  This is enabling service providers and the enterprise to embrace this technology with minimal effort.
• Cloud storage can start small and scale-up as needed. Organizations are no longer over-building to address the potential for rapid growth. Instead the drive is to put in place an architecture that is extremely flexible and that can scale on demand using commodity hardware and standard client access.
• Clouds are designed to be self-managing and don't require heavy IT manpower. Storage tiering, provisioning, and data movement are time-consuming tasks that are automated in cloud storage.
• Storage clouds can be tuned for specific uses or applications. For example, clouds can be tuned for archival very cost-effectively, or for streaming media performance.

"Cloud applications, computing, and storage are just emerging on the scene, yet there is a rapid heightening of interest in all things cloud," said Krishnan.  "We believe the impact of cloud technologies will be transformational and cloud will be a major way by which IT is consumed as we move forward.  Whether a company decides to buy (i.e. the company builds a private or internal cloud) or rent (i.e. the company rents by the GB per month from a public cloud storage service provider) cloud storage, or both, its advantages will soon be as main-stream as the architectures that came before it, including 3-tier web applications, client/server, and mainframe."