Venyu Blog

This has been a tough couple weeks for cloud providers, integrators, so-called “enablers,” and investors.

Iron Mountain announced their looking to sell off their Iron Mountain Digital business unit not long after announcing their discontinuation of cloud services like file archiving. Hardware vendors are also seemingly dropping out of the sky. Cirtas is pulling their ‘storage in the cloud’ enabling device. EMC cut their Atmos-as-a-service cloud storage (supposedly not to compete with their MSP’s).

Most notably, the much lauded Amazon EC2 platform experienced an outage this morning (4/21) taking several popular social media websites with it like Foursquare.

The bump in this cloudy road simply highlights the common misconception: cloud is magical – actually, it is very physical. Media and pundits alike are covering this news with an “Oh my gosh golly” attitude. Cloud is not infallable: systems do go down, business models do fail, technologies miss the mark.

Take for instance, when *insert celebrity name here* goes off the reservation – we are all absolutely blown away! How could they’ve done that … or why did they date her? You get the idea right? Cloud is in the limelight. Its the coolest most cutting edge term to hit tech since… since… hmm, baud?

We strive to make our client’s data invincible. We have safeguards in place to assure we don’t go down. Putting your data with a provider like Venyu is still 100% better than keeping it onsite or LTO-5! Bottomline: what happened today to Amazon is unfortunate. Their SLA allows for downtime, people knew what they were getting into when moving their data to EC2.

Putting your data somewhere safe is a concept that’s here to stay… for now, we’re calling that cloud computing.