Hi, this is Ben Smith. I want to spend a few minutes talking with you today about a new way to doing something you’re pretty used to doing in IT. Now, in IT we’ve never been short on buzz. The problem is, for each innovation that’s buzzworthy, two prove to be just buzz words, and are forgotten within months. Software as a service is currently generating a lot of buzz. What I’d like to talk to you about today, is a specific application of software services, and that’s storage. Now, we’re used to thinking about storage as hardware: hard discs, CD-ROM media, tape backup devices and the like, but with a dramatic increase in the availability of high bandwidth, low latency internet connections, and the decrease in the cost of that bandwidth, it’s time to start thinking about storage as a service that’s delivered through software.

In particular, storage services are ready-made for common types of secondary storage, like backup and archive, that typically only the largest businesses can afford. Think of it this way – your users continue to use their computers the way that they’re used to, but in the background their data is being backed up to a secure database that’s online. If the data is erased, or the user’s hardware should fail, the data can be easily restored, even if the user never comes to the main office.

The three factors that really make storage services buzzworthy for small and medium businesses: the pain that comes with infrastructure, the expansion of the traditional office, and the benefits of having best of re-technology and experts to operate it. Now, infrastructure is one of those things that everyone appreciates, but few people ever really see the price tag. When thinking about storage, or backup and archive, the infrastructure costs in hardware and remote access technologies can be cost prohibitive capital expenses. Further, infrastructure scales poorly, and is rarely agile at reasonable price points. Storage services, on the other hand, can be provisioned and deprovisioned as the business needs change.

The idea of the traditional central office is becoming more or less a quaint memory. The modern office has users that are more or less nomads. Desktop computers are making way for laptops. Me, for instance – I haven’t had a desktop computer at work for over five years. Branch offices are increasingly becoming the norm in business. Online storage services uniquely integrate into a world where data is as mobile as the users who create it. It’s always on, always working seamlessly to allow the users to work in the way that they want to work, not where they have to work. As expensive as infrastructure is, most of the time getting the expertise to operate it is even more expensive, and often quite elusive.

Software as a service allows everyone to get 24 by 7 IT experts managing and monitoring state-of-the-art hardware, without having to locate and staff it themselves. So for storage as a service, your business can have people that eat, sleep and drink storage, on a virtual IT team. Storage as a service is really something that’s worth the buzz that it’s generating today. Not only do storage services enable a modern workforce to work the way they want to, storage services do it in a way that makes good fiscal sense for businesses of all size, particularly the ones that want to be agile.