Another big area will be to have the cloud storage provider be able handle your data litigation readiness. In addition to storing all your data for retention purposes, it also indexes and organizes those files. When you are sued and need all the files relating to "Project 123," you simply make the request of the cloud for any document with "Project 123" in the name and they can be downloaded to a local server. We're already seeing this outsourcing of data litigation readiness done today in the e-mail space by companies like LiveOffice and Mimecast.
Storing the data appears to the user to be simple; they walk by the $150 1-TB hard drives all the time, so you have to do more than just be a monthly version of the same. While there are many factors in a cloud storage offering, providing more services around the actual storage of data is the path to greatness in cloud storage.
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George Crump is founder of Storage Switzerland, an analyst firm focused on the virtualization and storage marketplaces. It provides strategic consulting and analysis to storage users, suppliers, and integrators. An industry veteran of more than 25 years, Crump has held engineering and sales positions at various IT industry manufacturers and integrators. Prior to Storage Switzerland, he was CTO at one of the nation's largest integrators.