Iron Mountain Kills Its Public Cloud Storage Business

Anyone who’s been watching the cloud storage market knows that it’s been a race to the bottom, with prices reaching the point where it’s a commodity rather than a conversation-starter. And now research firm Gartner is reporting that Iron Mountain has decided to respond to their sinking margins in public cloud storage-as-a-service by pulling out of the market entirely, sunsetting their offerings.

Iron Mountain has already stopped accepting new customers, and they’re starting to help customers move to providers like Nirvanix, who are welcoming the exiles with open arms. But what does it mean for the cloud channel? Well, for starters, any appliance or software that used the Iron Mountain Archive Service Platform API on the backend for cloud storage won’t work properly. And that doesn’t even factor in the Iron Mountain partners who are losing a piece of their portfolio.

If you choose to stay with Iron Mountain for storage, again according to Gartner, they’ll migrate your data over to File System Archiving (FSA) in 2012, a hybrid solution that keeps policy-based archives on-premises while also backing up key data to the cloud. It’s not a bad compromise, and customers could potentially reap some benefits. But it’s probably not what they signed on for.

But what I found most interesting was the fact that Gartner implies that it’s likely failed to compete due to the fact that it’s just storage with no compute attached. With even Amazon offering cloud storage, it seems that customers are really looking for more of an all-in-one IT infrastructure offering.

Follow Talkin’ Cloud via RSS,Facebook and Twitter.Sign up for Talkin’ Cloud’s Weekly Newsletter, Webcasts and Resource Center. Read our editorial disclosures here.