One of the big advantages to cloud-based storage is that, unlike in-house storage, Situs can get additional space with a single phone call. At the time Situs was evaluating the hybrid storage solution, McCown says the company was figuring on about 150 percent data growth over three years. Situs has experienced about a 250 percent growth in data, and has added nearly 50 percent more employees since January.

"We have experienced a high amount of growth which we couldn't have foreseen, so we watch our internal storage system carefully," McCown says. As a result, Situs has had to adjust how much data is held locally on the appliance. To free up local resources, the company no longer keeps five years' worth of yearly backups locally as planned, but stores it in the cloud instead.

As for costs, Situs is saving $1,200 per month for tape and maintenance of tape libraries, and another $1,000 per month by eliminating tape storage and pickup fees. In addition, Situs has avoided hiring a full-time person to handle backups--something that would have been necessary with the tape system. The best advantage, says McCown, is that Situs was able to convert all its capital outlays for backup into a single recurring operational expense.

"Overall, this single monthly cost was very similar to what we had been paying tape-wise," McCown explains. "But we got the additional benefits of not having to acquire a secondary data center for our DR [disaster recovery] purposes and have someone manage that for us."

Situs, in short, is getting much more value for a similar cost.