Article: Archiving from the Cloud

A recent article over at ITBusinessEdge titled "Archiving to the Cloud" is worth a read. It brings a trend to light about the growing use of online storage for backups and archivals of data for businesses. This has been a trend now for a while that I've been seeing as more and more people become comfortable with cloud based computing they are starting to see the real benefits of it in different ways. Especially for archiving and backups. The writer notes, "It is important to understand the type of data that is being stored in the cloud. Almost all industry experts believe that cloud storage is an ideal medium for maintaining online, long-term, unstructured content. This sentiment has been echoed by the end user and early cloud adopters." This type of data that people are storing in the cloud is just the type of data that many tools are starting to pop up to support. You may have noticed a dramatic increase in the number of providers of these services. I've been working on a review of them, it started out as "10 Online Backup Solutions" but has since grown to 25+, and that is just the good ones.

One other trend that I've been noticing just starting to creep in recently takes this one step further. As people are moving more and more of their business computing to cloud based apps like Salesforce, Basecamp, whatever else, they are raising the concern about data ownership and are asking for backup solutions of their data that is stored in these applications so that they can maintain control of their critical business data. They want to have access to their own data at anytime just like they would with a typical backup, even if that data is stored in a managed, hosted application. You could call this trend "Archiving From the Cloud"

At Centripetal Software, we've recently released a product that is our first crack at addressing this space. Our product can backup all of your data, files and writeboards from 37Signals Basecamp and deliver it to you via Dropbox (for online archiving and versioning) or FTP if you want it to come directly to your own server.

Read the full article at ITBusinessEdge