That's the upshot of a recent survey of 133 CIOs/CTOs and their operations staff in North America conducted by SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association) and our industry analyst firm, Storage Strategies NOW. The survey paints a picture of a technology that's poised for takeoff -- if providers can overcome user apprehension over two big concerns: security and performance.

Anand Kapoor, vice president of technology of WNS Global Services, a business process outsourcing firm in Mumbai, India, puts it this way. "Generally you see two sets of early adopters: smaller enterprises and SMBs that cannot afford the redundancy that an enterprise-class infrastructure would cost, and larger enterprises that need rapidly scaling infrastructure that is managed by organizations with the core competencies related to storage," says Kapoor.

In a way, public cloud storage is like any outsourcing decision. Companies are faced with ever increasing storage requirements, many of which imply permanent retention of archives. So is it better to leave long-term storage management for generic applications like e-mail and CRM to external organizations whose primary business is providing those services, leaving IT more time to focus on critical business applications? Clearly, many CIOs and CTOs believe it is.

Cloud access appliance manufacturer Nasuni's CEO, Andres Rodriguez, likens public cloud storage to an electric utility. "You wouldn't try to build and manage a power generating station in your back yard, so why try to recreate the economies of scale that the cloud storage provider has available?" he asks.