A year later, and the cloud-based storage market has definite shape. One of the frontrunners is the latest race to offer up hosted, extensible cloud storage is Iron Mountain. With access over the cloud in mind, Virtual File Store is Iron Mountain's hosted offering for archival data storage for businesses. Enabled through a local gateway, and wrapped with all of the potential of Iron Mountain's rich information services, Virtual File Store is compelling. But it goes a bit beyond just compelling as Virtual File Store is also built on the Iron Mountain expertise, technology, and know how around information preservation and protection. In a landscape dotted by less than "sure thing" vendors, that makes a big difference. One place customers are seeing it? They can archive to the Iron Mountain cloud with confidence - and that makes a big difference in how an organization backs up and protects the data it is archiving.

We have come a long way over the past five years in fundamentally changing the way data is protected. After having put up with unreliable methods of backup to and recovery from tape we entered the new era of disk based backup. Most mid size companies and up today have augmented their data protection environments with this technology, at least for their most mission critical environments. They are now comfortable with keeping several weeks to several months worth of data on disk (for recovery purposes) and older backups on tape for regulatory or business compliance purposes. RTOs and RPOs have improved considerably as disk-based technologies are more reliable and give more predictable results than tape ever could.