Handing off personal or corporate data to a third party's hard drives and accessing it via the Internet can be a less expensive alternative to provisioning all that capacity in your data center or home network. It may be used in conjunction with cloud-based applications, but also just for archiving or disaster recovery, Illuminata's Webster said. In many cases, the cloud-storage service can be set up as a target when data is being backed up. The information can be sent to the cloud only or to the cloud and a dedicated tape backup system simultaneously, he said.

With the economy weakening, cloud storage will be big next year, Webster believes. Paying for additional capacity on a monthly basis moves that expense out of the IT department's capital budget and into its operational budget, which tends to be easier to fund when times are tough, he said. It's also relatively quick because nothing needs to be purchased or installed, he added.

A related option, managed services, may also take off in the coming year, Webster said. While keeping their own storage systems in-house, enterprises can pay a vendor such as Brocade or IBM to manage it for them remotely. The vendor can monitor alerts through an appliance at the customer's site and respond if needed. If IT staff needs to be cut back, this may be one way to maintain service levels to the rest of the company, Webster said.