Recent disturbances in the Force, err the Cloud, have led to much handwringing in the media about the viability of the Cloud, both from an end-user and business perspective. We’re not here to point fingers nor go into the details about what happened or who’s leaving the market, but suffice it to say:
If you’re an end-user, it doesn’t matter if your IT infrastructure is on-premise or in the Cloud. You still need a contingency plan in place in the event of a disaster. And as you plan, you need to determine how resilient your infrastructure or that of your Cloud service provider is.
If you’re on the business side, don’t fret. As ESG analyst David Chapa notes in his excellent post, “Can you make money in the cloud?,” just because some companies are exiting the market does not mean there’s no business opportunity. In fact, he says, “There is money to be made, but somewhere along the way you have to charge for the service and you need to provide good value for that service. Since “cloud” adoption is still just that–being adopted–you have to be willing to “think big, start small and by all means keep it moving.””
Very sound advice from Chapa who goes on to cite companies succeeding in the Cloud backup business (including some of our alliance partners) as well as singling out our own EVault Cloud-Connected Service Provider program when he writes, “i365 has a great channel program and offers a variety of ways for its solution to be deployed–either by directing backup to their managed data center or to a channel partner’s managed data center.”
Chapa sums things up nicely when he states:
The stutter steps of this week and last shouldn’t deter companies or customers from looking at how to use cloud in their environments.
We couldn’t have said it better….
