How Cloud Computing Could Kill the Need for Data Recovery

Cloud computing is one of those annoying buzzwords that's actually linked to something cool--that is, if you're aware of the potential advantages of the concept.

To put it simply (albeit a bit inaccurately), cloud computing is the sharing of resources, both in terms of processing and memory. A company like Google might loan some of its bandwidth to a private corporation, which can use that bandwidth rather than setting up its own servers. This cuts their costs and allows them to take bigger IT risks. On a smaller scale, cloud computing services like Google Documents (I'm certainly not advertising for Google here, but they've got a pretty visible set of cloud computing services) can be used by people from all over the world to work on their documents online. A single document can be accessible from any computer.

This is great news for a lot of industries, but it might be a problem for the highly competitive and extremely lucrative data recovery industry. The fact is that cloud computing will soon make every computer user rethink their data security strategy, and data loss might be a thing of the past.

More and more data is being stored online, and that means that hard drive space is becoming less and less important. Already, many business people and laymen use netbooks which don't even contain hard drives--instead, they rely on a small amount of flash memory. Once the technology improves to the point where using cloud computing is as simple and secure as storing files locally, there will be no reason to store files locally.

Data recovery companies will miss out on a lot of personal hard drive business, and it'll get worse when companies stop using inadequately set-up servers and start renting space from a cloud computing service. A data recovery RAID array can cost tens of thousands of dollars, and companies will start avoiding that cost--and data recovery companies will miss out on a lot of money.

Meanwhile, the companies that sell cloud computing space are already experts in data storage. Most use massive servers with multiple levels of redundancy. That means that when a hard drive fails, it's replaced without incident--even if several drives fail at the same time. They're good at backup, so data recovery won't be necessary anymore.

Of course, there will probably be a scattered need for data recovery services for decades to come, as businesses hate change. Even if cloud computing is a cheaper and more efficient option than using large arrays and personal hard drives, companies will stick to what they know, giving the major data recovery companies enough business to stay open. Many of the smaller recovery companies will close, though, and you can expect the price of all data recovery cases to go up substantially. It's part of the business--or, rather, part of the end of the business.

How do you think cloud computing will affect industry? Post below.