Consumers and SMBs lead in cloud adoption

The consumer market is far ahead of the corporate space when it comes to backing up data in the cloud.

So claims Charles Fitzgerald, vice president in product management of EMC-owned Decho, who believes that both consumers and small businesses are way ahead of large scale enterprises when it comes to the adoption of cloud storage and backup.

"There is a lot of discussion in enterprise but they are way behind in the application. Business is normally the one that lands the new tech, this time the consumer space is well ahead," he told IT PRO.

"More and more small businesses don't distinguish between work and personal life. They just back up everything. It is at this unmanaged IT level that adoption is no problem. Enterprise however will take much longer."

Referencing an IDC report released in May at the EMC World Conference 2009, Fitzgerald said that there was a looming crisis, or in cloud terms a "gathering storm," with the amount of data people are accumulating.

He said: "It grows and grows every year and on multiple devices. Once we had one PC box that stored everything. Now we have several PCs, smartphones, etc, that we want to back up."

Fitzgerald also believes the information is getting more valuable "not just to the people that want to keep hold of it themselves, but it is valuable for other people who could use it for fraud and identity theft."

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