Who’s going to back the cloud up?

The most vehement of the cloud evangelists seem to think that any day now anything and everything will live in the cloud.

Whatever pace and end state you foresee, we can all agree that there certainly will be steps and that the journey will be different for all organizations.

A big enabler for “all in” cloud consumption is Software-as-a-service with a large number of very mature suppliers of various types of applications “on tap”.
Perhaps the most well known of these is Salesforce.com, which is part of the CRM market, which continues to be the largest market for SaaS.

However, trust is the ultimate gateway to cloud adoption, and in trust, backup is a very important component.

I am a sceptic guy, but to get anywhere in life, you need to trust.
So.. trust, but verify.

All credible SaaS suppliers provide backup functionality, of course, they do it with varying success and granularity though.

With the advent of CRM SaaS, and the success of Salesforce.com, customers began to see challenges with the rather rigid policies Salesforce.com commits to.
The backups are rather infrequent and tough to export and restore.

This, however, is only one example which I selected because of the popularity and general knowledge about Salesforce.com.

The bigger issue on the road to trust and maturity is a standard for these matters.
Standards don’t come easy, it’s a classic design by committee, and the results are bland, if there even are results.

There certainly must be a huge market for whomever grabs the opportunity to provide a middle layer that SaaS providers can implement and SaaS buyers can hook into.
Think of it as RSS for backup.

I would imagine the control and data paths to take place over REST to be flexible, web enabled and programmable.
There would be a great opportunity for all makers of backup solutions to easily expand their capabilities to control and move data between public and private cloud solutions.

In the end, this could take care of a huge trust issue, maintain compliance and accelerate cloud adoption.