Our Cloud Revenues program helps hosting providers grow their Cloud sales, by identifying high-growth product segments and the associated best practices for selling them.

The first solution profiled this way is Cloud Archiving and Compliance.

Achieving Compliance

Archiving and Compliance is a very important product category for Cloud hosting providers, as it is a technology that addresses the high profile market fears about personal data privacy issues head on.

In general the primary value of this technology is that it enables customers and providers to achieve compliance with regulatory requirements, in particular for record-keeping legislation.

This means that one aspect is must address is how access to the information is regulated – Given the many relevant mandates most notably FOIA (Freedom of Information Access) this is a sticky area that attracts considerable hesitancy over Cloud outsourcing.

Therefore a strong product suite in this area can help calm prospective customers for Cloud hosting in general, as well as offer a compelling category of services that will meet many different needs of large IT organizations.

Increasingly we will see the emergence of ‘Cloud Audit’ best practices coupled with industry assessment and certification programs, so that Cloud Providers will be able to attest to their in-house capabilities in these areas, offering a re-assuring pedigree about their class of service.

Leveraging Cloud Storage

Also this product category highlights the principle ‘disrupting’ quality of the Cloud wave, with regards to disruptive business models.

In the case of Cloud Archiving this refers to the ability to leverage widely available Cloud Storage as the baseline component for the service, an IaaS that is considered commodity and it’s then up to you to assemble the more complex solution you need, in terms of security, availability, .. etc. For example Rackspace Cloud Files.

The use of archiving software solutions adds this layer for those requirements and by doing so offers a middleware that will appeal to a broader audience too. Features include overwrite protection, record retention and archiving, full Search capabilities.

In short the Cloud trend is all about the fact that smaller Cloud Providers can invest in creating high-end services like Cloud Archiving, by using low-cost commodity platforms coupled with smart software.

Previously this market has required very high-end storage units that had the intelligence built in, whereas now it is the Cloud itself that can offer this.