Iron Mountain exists public cloud storage market

BANGALORE, INDIA: Cloud storage service provider Iron Mountain announced that it will close down its public cloud storage business, as per market research firm Gartner.

Gartner analysts Michele C. Caminos and Adam W. Couture, say: "Iron Mountain is the third vendor (after Startup and Vaultscape) to drop out of the public cloud storage market to concentrate on other technology areas. In 2009, Gartner predicted that less than one-third of cloud investments would reach ROI by 2011."

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The company, which has stopped accepting new customers as of 1 April 2011, said that 'the official end date for the service would be "no sooner than 1H13'.

However, it will continue to support its current cloud storage customers, and will help them in migrating to another provider or return the data.

"Virtual File Store customers that stay with Iron Mountain will be transferred to a higher-value offering, File System Archiving (FSA) in 2012. The new offering will be a hybrid that leverages policy-based archiving on site and in the cloud with indexing and classification capabilities," add the analysts.

Archive Service Platform customers have no migration path and are being terminated or moved to an alternative service provider.

Only recently did information storage major EMC took its cloud service Atmos Online, launched in 2009, offline.

"To date, public cloud storage IaaS has had a modest level of adoption. Not incidentally, all three service providers’ go-to-market strategies focused purely on cloud storage unaccompanied by any cloud compute services. Now, only Nirvanix and Zetta remain as pure-play public cloud providers of network attached storage," add the analysts.