Should you bank on storage services?

You know me–you see me here twice a week. Would you trust me to host your corporate data? OK, then, would you trust a company with which you have no ties, but which makes storage hosting its business?

Two recent events brought storage service providers (SSPs) to my attention. First, Quantum, the disk drive manufacturer, completed the sale of its Hard Disk Drive Group to Maxtor on Friday, leaving the company with DLT and Storage Systems groups. Quantum will reinvent itself as an SSP. Second, an IDC research report notes that big hardware manufacturers are getting into the SSP game.

I’ve been noticing a fair number of companies lately that are leaving off selling goods to begin marketing services instead. In some cases the company was in the wrong business to begin with. Aventail, for instance, used to have a VPN product that relied on the SOCKS protocol. As SOCKS lost favor, Aventail retrenched, becoming a managed services provider.

That’s not Quantum’s problem, however. Quantum, along with Seagate, Maxtor, and Western Digital, was among the top disk drive makers for desktop PCs–a fiercely competitive market. Disk drive prices have gone down as their capacities have gone up, and gaining market share in that environment was difficult.

But if Quantum thinks it’s going to do better as an SSP, it has another think coming.

The market for storage service providers is completely unproven. To date, according to the IDC report, only a tiny volume of actual cash for services has changed hands. In part, that’s because outsourced storage is a relatively new service, but there are more substantial obstacles.

No one has yet made a compelling case to me for storage services. True, you pay less for the service on a monthly basis, and buying your own hardware means you have to maintain it. But if you outsource your storage, you have no capital equipment to write down. You’re also trusting another organization to maintain the availability and security of your information assets. I wouldn’t worry too much about availability at an SSP, because that’s probably among its top priorities, but I’d be far less comfortable leaving my corporate secrets in somebody else’s protection.

IDC thinks otherwise. Its research projects an annual growth rate of 139 percent in storage utility spending over the next several years. Yet even its report notes that worries about availability, security, and payback are serious barriers to these vendors’ success.

The fact that large manufacturing companies plan to get into this market should make smaller players nervous. The large companies have diverse revenue streams that should allow them to endure a slowdown in their service business–a slowdown that could force less well-funded organizations out of business.

Not that I’m anticipating a slowdown–the business outlook has never been rosier, has it?

If you plan to outsource your data storage, select a vendor whose fiscal stability makes it likely to endure an economic downturn. Begin with a pilot project of non-strategic data. Make sure you verify your vendor’s availability measures, and get it guaranteed in a service-level agreement. And once you get your hosted data project off the ground, drop me an e-mail and let me know how it’s going.

PDA viruses? Don’t buy the FUD

Robert Lemos of ZDNet News sums up the issues nicely in a recent report. On one side are the antivirus vendors, spending a little of their credibility hyping potential threats. On the other are independent analysts who note the muted nature of attacks so far. There have been only two virus-like attacks on handhelds to date, not counting a couple of incidents specific to smart phones. Liberty Crack was a programming exercise that accidentally escaped into the wild. Phage harbored code that could erase Palm applications, but included no way to replicate itself from Palm to Palm.

What’s the worst thing a Palm virus can do? Erase all the information on someone’s handheld device? How catastrophic is that, really? If users frequently synchronize their handheld devices, then the remedy is to resync–voilà, they’re back in business.

To protect yourself against Palm viruses, take these three steps. First, make sure you keep your regular antivirus program updated. Many can scan the .prc files Palm OS runs to find malicious code.

Of course, that would recover only the operating system and built-in utilities. Users may need to reinstall custom applications separately. So my second piece of advice is to buy a more powerful backup program for your handhelds that can restore all the information on the devices. I use BackupBuddy from Blue Nomad, and it has served me well on the occasions when my trusty old Palm Professional has locked up and required a hard reset.

Could a virus corrupt information on a PDA without erasing it, thereby compromising its value? Probably not without your noticing it, in which case simply delete the corrupted data and proceed with synchronizing as usual.

Just in case, however, my third piece of advice is to back up your desktop clients–and not just those of handheld device users. The desktops of PDA owners, in effect, serve as the backup platforms for the handheld devices. Unlike regular backup media, however, desktop PCs are pretty dynamic, meaning their data and configuration are subject to frequent change. An administrative assistant who momentarily spaces out is far more likely to damage or delete an important document than a virus, handheld or otherwise. Backing up the My Documents folder and certain other crucial folders on all client PCs is a prudent insurance policy against the kind of lost productivity that can ensue after the accidental deletion of a crucial file. Computer Associates’ ARCserveIT (see review), Veritas Software’s Backup Exec (see review), and Legato Systems’ NetWorker are three excellent products for enterprise customers; there are several of others.

If you’re budgeting to improve the safety and stability of your organization’s infrastructure, apply some dollars not to superfluous handheld antivirus applications, but to client licenses for your company’s enterprise backup software.