With many gurus telling the world that the age of the cloud has come, the move to the cloud is not always all it’s cracked up to be.
In a recent study, a cloud storage provider, Drobo, discovered that while most small and medium sized business were well aware of the what the cloud had to offer, they had no intentions of moving all of their storage away from local servers or VPSs.
Using over 250 businesses from around the world, Drobo discovered that 99% would not be moving all of their storage to the cloud, and the majority of those they spoke to said that 75% or more of their data would be staying on-site. Seventy-six percent cited on-site backup as a high priority, and 89% said that they were unhappy with the plans that current storage providers could offer, both in terms of price and in terms of available features.
This data leads to a number of conclusions, the most easily drawn being that SMBs want a better price for their storage. Costs for storage plans range anywhere from $600 to $1,200 a year, and in many cases, companies can purchase an on-site server for storage at a far cheaper price, and never have to worry about paying a recurring fee or the fact that their data is located somewhere else.
SMBs are also not confident in the recovery and backup options offered by storage providers, according to the data from the Drobo survey. While online backup services are popular, SMBs prefer to keep their mission-critical data close to home in case of an emergency.
The cloud storage industry is gaining ground, but has a long way to go before SMBs accept it as their first, best option.
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