Friday 10 September 2010
American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, which has been licensing artists’ and publishers’ rights since 1914, moved 91GB of scanned images of signed paperwork into Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud-based Simple Storage Service (S3). Next time your local hot spot advertises live music, or your favorite DJ spins a new tune on the radio, it’s likely that their contracts to license those songs will be stored in the cloud. John Johnson, vice president of licensing at ASCAP, says the organization had hoped to use Salesforce.com Inc.’s hosted service to manage and store digitized documents, but it offered very little storage.
Developing cloud storage strategies can be complicated, and there’s the nagging issue of security. But according to early adopters, the real silver lining of cloud storage is the savings. Analysts say that moving to cloud-based services can save IT money, because cloud computing involves the use of a shared infrastructure and allows certain costs to shift from capital expenses to operating expenses. One early user, Peter Hedlund, a programmer at Encyclopedia Virginia in Charlottesville, Va., says he’s interested in cloud storage because he likes the predictable prices he can get from Zetta Inc., a cloud storage service provider in Sunnyvale, Calif.
Cloudize Inc., a collaboration service, uses cloud storage from Nirvanix Inc. in San Diego. The San Francisco-based start-up pays the same rate as Encyclopedia Virginia — 25 cents per gigabyte per month, which Cloudize CEO Edwin Fu says is ideal for planning and budgeting. But he also likes the fact that Nirvanix applies that price to his entire company’s online storage use, instead of charging on a per-user basis.
