Is the Sky Falling on the Cloud Storage Market?

The cloud storage market took a beating in April. Not from a stock standpoint-cloud storage infrastructure providers seemed to close the month quite strongly-but from a market stability standpoint. Cloud enablement vendor Cirtas announced it would be retrenching and letting go of all sales and marketing staff while it works out product issues, Iron Mountain announced it would shut down its cloud file storage and archive service and sell off its digital business, and Amazon had a major Elastic Block Storage (EBS) outage. The three events, happening very close together, caused many to question the viability of the market as a whole. But before making sweeping judgments about cloud storage, it is important to understand not just what happened, but why.