Informatica's announcement in the India online Press  (CIOL)  of the industry first Cloud based archiving solution has got me thinking.

The nuances of statements like this are intriguing to me. What does “industry first” actually mean? and that’s before I start on cloud definitions. As a system integrator we have been able to offer this to clients for months, (see my blog http://www.centiq.co.uk/blog/gartners-cloud-predictions-cloud-9-or-cloud-cuckoo.html ). The technology we use is the same for archiving and retirement, we can even offer it as a fully managed appliance. However because we plug the bits together maybe we weren’t first (although we also never claimed to be). So perhaps Informatica have released the “first” direct from vendor solution? Although by using Amazon are they not just performing the same systems integrator role that we are? From what I can tell from the announcement, all that is being provided is a secure cloud storage connector. As archive technologies tend to be “flat” file based, (we use an Enhanced Storage Flat Format which to compress the footprint,  Applimation uses XLM which typically bloats the storage required) all that is happening is this file locator reference pointers have moved from internal to external (cloud) . Tarmin Gridbank has been doing this for years. It is my view that the cloud needs to offer more to the mid-market sector than simply moving the machine room to the cloud. Yes it utilises economies of scale that may not otherwise be available, it can offer more flexibility but IaaS doesn’t remove the need to train, implement and maintain the archive solution by internal resources. The providers that are able to take an organisations Information Asset Management policy, generate and maintain consistency of a clients archive are the ones that will fully address the cost containment pressures of these organisations and provide real value to the customers. for full details of Informatica's announcement see:

http://www.ciol.com/Developer/Databases/News-Reports/Informatica-takes-database-archiving-to-the-cloud/131963/0/