I have added a poll in the right-hand column: would you back up business data to the cloud? The assumption here is: the cloud in this case is a public cloud or a service provider cloud--not your own private cloud. I haven't qualified this further with any questions about the size of organization you work for, what level of encryption or security you might want in order to be able to say "yes" or anything else of that nature. Basically, the question is: would you be willing to treat backup software as a service, and use somebody else's infrastructure at a different site to do your backup?
For anybody that wants to add some explanation to their answer, please feel free to comment to this post.
I am going to leave the other poll (deduplication ratios) up, as I am curious to see how the answer changes over time, or if it does. As of this post, 240 respondents have answered. About 2/3 of the respondents are from the US, and the results are: 22% say 5:1, 32% say 10:1, 29% say 20:1 and 18% say 50:1 . I will check the results again in 6 months or so.
I appreciate the poll, Scott, but feel it definitely needs some qualification and explanation. Asking simply "would you backup to the cloud" leaves it wide open to interpretation. Who is "you"? Yourself or a business? Which cloud? What cost? What capabilities? You left it vague on purpose, I know, but this vagueness is going to cloud (pardon the pun) your answers...
Personally, I back up to the cloud every day, and have for three years. I know LOTS of folks use services like Mozy, Iron Mountain, and Symantec to do this as well. Including MANY EMCers. I also know of businesses who use cloud storage as a backup target, but archiving is a much more common application. Consider all of the Zantaz and MessageOne users! This has been going on for a very long time, too, and many might not even know they're "backing up to the cloud"!
Again, thanks for asking. But don't be surprised if the answers don't reflect existing use cases and practices!
Posted by: Stephen Foskett | July 24, 2009 at 08:25 AM
Thanks Stephen.
I have made a modification so that the poll now reads "business data". I know there is a lot of other amibiguity, and I am going to leave things that way (including the archive stuff--my intuition is that cloud archive is going to happen easier and faster than cloud backup, btw).
Unfortunately I lost all the votes when I did that--anybody who has already voted please feel free to do so again.
Posted by: Scott Waterhouse | July 24, 2009 at 08:43 AM
Would I back-up raw business data into the cloud? No! Would I backup business data with strong encryption, why not? It's probably more secure than those non-encrypted off-site tape backups.
Personally, I'm using things like Dropbox more and more to keep my various machines in sync and it also gets it offsite as well.
Posted by: Martin Glassborow | July 28, 2009 at 12:26 PM