Archive Storage Decisions - Cloud or On-Premise?

When selecting an archive there are a few major decisions that impact the rest of the design. The first one that will guide the other decisions comes down to, Hosted vs. On-Premise. This is not an easy decision and we don't expect that to change anytime soon. This decision used to be black & white, however this is changing, the decision was either outsource everything or keep everything on-premise. If choosing on-premise, the next decision was to select the archive storage platform, NetApp SnapLock, EMC Centera, HDS HCAP and recently Data Domain plus others.

There is somewhere north of 30,000 on-premise enterprise deployments of archiving solutions today. As the data growth of these archives continues to sky-rocket, many of these customers are debating on shifting their archive to the cloud. While many companies are doing just this and migrating to cloud archive vendors like LiveOffice, there are many others that are hesitant to throw away their investment in their on-premise archive solution.

Imagine if these customers would have the ability to keep their most accessed data (newest) stored in the on-premise archive storage solution (NetApp, Centera, HCAP, DDUP, etc) while being able to migrate all of the least accessed (oldest) data in the cloud in an automated fashion.

The ability to scale the archive would be endless and the capital expenses would be minimized while having a virtual unlimited storage pool in the cloud to work with. All while ensuring that the end users access their data in the same way they do today. Such as, searching working the same way, shortcuts still working and the users have no idea their data is in the cloud.

Imagine...