A Blog About Software As A Service
This blog is all about software as a service (SaaS) for business. If it is in the cloud, you will find it here.
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Where are you going to put all your data?
Posted on May 4th, 2009 No commentsJust ran my daily google and twitter search on SaaS and IT management terms and saw several people linking to the following story on datamation: Online Data Storage to Surge. Two analysts from Coughlin Associates and Objective Analysis say that the average home could have as much as 12 Terabytes of data by 2014. That raises the question: Where are you going to put it, and how are you going to back it up?
From the article:
All that content, though, has to be managed. The enterprise has all kinds of enterprise-scale storage, archiving, indexing and backup. There’s plenty of options for a Fortune 1000 company, such as refrigerator-sized storage systems from EMC.
For the home user? Not so much. There has been the advent of network attached storage (NAS) for home users and Microsoft does have its own consumer server, Windows Home Server.
For the most part, home backup is mostly low-tech, like dragging one folder to another hard disk on your own computer or a USB-attached hard drive. Coughlin said simplicity is needed because home users are not storage administrators, nor do they want to be.
“A commercial user may have more capabilities to do monitoring and management, and tagging and metadata. Home users don’t have the time or experience. It will become a crucial item for people with storage items,” he said.
SaaS seems to be the most interesting answer to me at least (note my bias by looking at the title of this blog!). I just don’t see the average home user spending time, money and energy setting up their own backup process. Why bother when they can back up their data remotely as a background process?
Sure, this is a site about B-to-B SaaS, but this article was something I had to highlight. When a report comes out showing that consumers of the future will have to rely on remote backups it just emphasizes the point that SaaS is here to stay. And with it, I think that IT departments will be starting to gradually accept the idea of SaaS for more aspects of IT management. But again, I admit it: I am biased.
