Good Morning All-
Full disclosure- I own a commercial record center and provide offsite
data protection through the use of Hugh's Firelock vault. 
Here is a Q & A with one of our tape customers that operates a pretty
good sized data center-


Jeff, we have looked at backups to the cloud ... here are some of our
thoughts/conclusions.

Concerns:
*	Security of data ... any solution needs to be secured and
protected.
*	Bandwidth and timeliness ... while backups can often be
accomplished because of incremental backups, restore times tend to
increase significantly with a cloud solution.
*	Cost ... when we have looked at this the cost has been higher
than on-site.
Why would it not work with your organization?
*	We believe that backups of desktops will work ... however
because of concerns above do not believe it is ready for server backups.
Do you use on line backup in conjunction with tape backup?
*	Not today ... but continue to evaluate for desktops.  
Any other insight as to where you believe this technology is heading-
good and bad
*	Cloud backups would make sense for servers and databases if they
could be integrated with our Disaster Recovery site.  If we could
restore from the on-line cloud backups at our DR site as fast or faster
than we could from tape, then it would make sense.   We have looked at
using IBM for the cloud based solution, as they are also our DR site,
however the cost was prohibitive.

I think his last response sums up cloud vs. tape from a DR perspective. 

Jeff Fronius
Advanced Records Management

By the way, how does one audit a cloud?

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