In the fall of 2009, a survey of more than 400 IT professionals probed their status and plans for cloud storage as a means of handling unstructured data. A broad spectrum of industries was included in the survey with software and technology, government, education and financial services being the most prevalent.

As part of the survey, Respondents were asked to select which applications they either already were or would consider moving to the cloud. Multiple selections could be made.

The two most often-selected applications were backup, selected by 38 percent of the respondents, and online archive at 37 percent. There is no surprise there, as those are very early use cases that can fit into first-generation cloud storage offerings.

Data warehousing (28 percent), primary file storage (25 percent) and business continuance (18 percent) were the next most chosen applications. It’s interesting that primary file storage scored as high as it did. Many early cloud offerings do not make that an easy transition as new APIs and storage techniques are required. This indicates though a need and willingness on the part of the users to explore this option.

Twenty-six percent of the respondents selected “none,” indicating that they would not consider using cloud storage for anything. I suppose the reverse logic would say that 74% would consider cloud storage?

At Zetta, approximately a third of our clients are doing primary storage, usually workgroup collaboration, a third are doing active archiving and a third are doing some form of off-site data protection for backup or DR.

You can download the full survey report here.

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