Is The Gap Between Consumer and Enterprise Cloud Storage Closing?

We know that data is growing at an exponential rate, IDG’s 2011 Survey of The Digital Universe, sponsored by EMC revealed that 1.8 Zetabytes of data was created in 2011 and that this set to double every two years. With data continuing to outpace available storage capacity, changes are afoot but as ever it is the cost of this storage that comes under the spotlight.

As detailed in our previous post the recent launch of Google Drive has certainly put Cloud Storage on the map but what it’s also highlighted is that consumer storage is pretty low cost especially when you compare it to the equivalent tiers of enterprise storage.

Below we’ve taken a price comparison table used in a recent Lifehacker post which shows you storage costs per gigabyte and the tier at which ‘free storage’ ends with the consumer end user providers. We’ve then gone on to include what these costs equate to for considerably larger data requirements (terabyte level).

*costing based on multiple terabyte capacities purchased

We thought it would be useful to see how these service providers stack up when it comes to keeping larger data quantities and it certainly begs the question as to whether this will impact on driving down the cost of enterprise cloud storage to close the gap between the two levels. However questions over confidentiality, integrity and availability of data when using cloud storage (and this is where Arkivum scores highly with three maintained copies of data and its unique 100% data integrity guarantee), shows there’s a clear need for new storage services dedicated to long term data safety and security.