In 2011, cloud storage was one of the few technologies that could attribute its success to the lagging economy.  “Cloud storage systems and services helped users deal with the uncertain economics of 2011 by letting them fund that growth using operational expenditure funding, rather than having to make capital expenditures in the hardware, software and people required to run one’s own data center,” says Sharon Fisher in her Network Computing article.

The growth in demand for storage has been huge.  According to Aberdeen Group, 15% of companies in a June study reported their data growing between 80% and 100% annually.  And it’s not just organizations that need cloud storage.  With digital media files so large in size, consumers are also looking for an online repository for their personal media.  This year we’ve seen a variety of cloud service offerings emerge targeting anywhere from the consumer to the large organization.

From a business standpoint, organizations are seeing benefit from cloud storage in a number of ways – to relieve the pressure of escalating IT infrastructure costs and as an effective alternative for disaster recovery.

According to Techaisle, an SMB-focused research firm, “SMBs globally spent $11 billion on cloud computing in 2011.”  This is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 12% until 2015.