When people everywhere are talking-up the benefits of the cloud, it seems almost bizarre to learn one company is abandoning some of its cloud storage services.
It has been reported this week Iron Mountain Digital, a company which has been in the cloud for little more than a year, is planning to completely phase out its online storage business by 2013.
No other major cloud storage player has ever pulled-out of the sector.
But it's not a complete retreat. Iron Mountain has reportedly notified its customers it is only withdrawing its Virtual File Store and Archive Service Platform commodity cloud storage solutions.
That means the company isn't competing with the massive players like Amazon and Google for a share of the low-cost public cloud storage market, and instead allows it to focus on more specialised services.
Iron Mountain is a provider of records management and storage, including paper documents, scanning and digitising services, shredding and media destruction and intellectual property management, among other services.
The company even stores some of the world's most valuable historical artefacts and cultural treasures.
