Alison Turner asks the pIT stop panel:

Drivers such as cost and the green agenda are making organisations rethink their approach to storage, as well as the opportunities offered by cloud / utility computing – so are we going to see a shift towards remote storage or are legal risks such as privacy and data protection going to get in the way?

The pIT stop panel’s replies:

We’re already seeing a very strong shift towards remote storage. This is not a forecast - rather it’s a question of describing what’s happening now. For example, Salesforce.com customers store their customer information in the cloud - and what data is more valuable than that?

Privacy and data protection risks are in some senses overblown. In the UK for example, the data protection regulatory regime is so light touch it is practically non-existent. That said, companies trading in geographies such as Germany and Spain need to be far more careful. With that in mind its no accident that Amazon just introduced a European datacentre for its cloud offerings - S3 (storage) and EC2 (compute power). Regarding data as a service - developers are voting with their credit cards, buying subscriptions from services such as Amazon. Meanwhile Google Docs Enterprise offers email archiving through the acquisition of Postini. A number of enterprise online backup services are emerging, although there is currently no clear winner.

Storage and compliance were already converging – as regulations affect so much corporate information. But one interesting trend is the rise of “green tape” - the red tape that environmental legislation is driving. Because of the importance of data sharing for better environmental outcomes, cloud storage makes a great deal of sense.

Finally, though it’s important to state that storage costs continue to crash, storage has never been cheaper – and enterprise IT staff need to respond to that fact. To compete against simple cloud services, IT will likely need to introduce simple chargeback, graded charges for different kinds of data, underpinned by hierarchical storage management.

By James Governor, co-founder and principal analyst, RedMonk

Lots of elements of the IT infrastructure are moving to a cloud or utility model. To start with it was simple applications such as sales force automation that were delivered through this model. More recently there have been computing clouds and storage clouds coming to market, with new vendors and old vendors alike bringing offerings to market. So it's a very timely question.

Some categories of storage for enterprises will definitely move into this model. Already we're seeing archival services from the cloud. We're also seeing enterprise equivalents of the successful consumer services, storing shared information on remote services - as part of a collaborative working environment. However, I'm not convinced that the storage model will move completely into the cloud. Just as there were "server huggers" who didn't want to get rid of their servers and use remote equipment, so will there be "disk and tape huggers" who don't want to let storage outside of their four walls. Sometimes this is for purely cultural, or fear of change, reasons, but there are also genuine compliance questions that are quite intractable. Sensitive data will probably not move to the cloud to any great extent for another generation - the human fear factors are too great.

For the enterprise I tend to advise thinking about storage in the traditional hierarchical way. Some information is on disk, some on tape, and some in long term archive. Cloud-based storage is another category of storage than fits into any storage framework, rather than being a replacement paradigm.

At a consumer level the picture will pan out slightly differently and both cloud-based archive and simpler online storage will be absolutely mainstream - if they're not already. These services are not driven by archival requirements; they're more driven by the desire to have the same files available at every PC that you work with - without carrying your life around on a memory stick. There are a huge number of choices for the consumer.

By David Mitchell, senior vice president of IT research, Ovum

There is a short answer to this which is “yes, but…” Unfortunately there are numerous challenges to be faced including, but not limited to, those you mention in the question.

Cloud services and outsourced storage will be adopted by many businesses. However, almost all new technologies are adopted gradually and rarely replace existing systems wholesale. Ask any IT manager, no legacy system goes away quickly. Such applications are simply unable to be re-used up in the cloud as they are written today. Nor are they easily modified to fit a model such as remote storage or data sharing among multiple users.

There are also some major issues that still need to be worked out around cloud services. For example, if you outsource email, what happens if you are party to a lawsuit and have to provide relevant materials during discovery? Will your outsourced provider retain too little or too much information, and do they have the ability to sort through thousands of messages and only provide the right ones? This is just one example of the legal, security, regulatory, performance and business issues that need to be figured out before cloud or outsourced storage ramp to their full potential. Not only that, but such regulations are not uniform across the global economy.

In the medium term, most companies will continue to work within their owned infrastructure and opportunistically use cloud services where they make sense. The rapid maturing of technologies such as streaming and application virtualisation will likely provide a more immediate payoff to companies looking to break away from existing application delivery models.

By Mike Ferron-Jones, manager, emerging compute models programme, Intel

There are two key trends here and the questioner is right to link them together.

First, so-called cloud computing. This is simply the latest buzzword for a trend that has gone under a variety of subtly different guises and technologies for some time – utility computing, distributed computing, software as a service, application service providers, hosting companies and so on are all facets of what is now being seen as a move to more software and data being accessed across the internet. It’s not at all untypical of the IT industry that it has to come up with a new name to describe it – heaven forbid, “ordinary” people might understand what the industry does otherwise.

Having said that, cloud / utility – call it what you will – is an emerging trend but one that appears to have all the portents to become a significant force for change. Salesforce.com was initially dismissed as a service only for small or medium-sized businesses, but some serious multinationals are now customers. Construction giant Taylor Woodrow recently signed up for Google Apps. And the Amazon services that James Governor mentions above are increasingly being seen as models for how corporates could use remote processing and storage services.

So, simple answer to part one – yes, we will see shift to remote storage, but as one option among many alongside existing storage technologies and services. If it’s right for you, it’s now worth investigating what benefits it might bring.

The second trend is that of privacy. I think this is the fundamental issue that the IT industry, businesses and government have to address before the internet can shift up a gear into its next phase of growth. Put simply, consumers and business users love the internet, but they are worried about their personal information and how it is used and accessed.

The industry has seen a sales opportunity here – but it hasn’t really gone about addressing the issue seriously. The UK government will talk about identity management and ID cards, but it doesn’t fully understand the context and is mired in the politics. Business understands the problem better, but has yet to work out how to make serious money out of it.

The solution here is twofold – creating a culture of security and data protection in organisations, and putting data protection and privacy back in the hands of those who care about it the most – you, the people whose data it is.

My guess is that it will be a while before major organisations feel confident enough to entrust highly sensitive personal data to a “cloud-based” storage service. You won’t see HM Revenue & Customs sign up soon, nor any of the big banks. But certainly for lower-value data, aged or archived data, it makes a lot of sense. Over time, as privacy-enhancing technologies emerge and improve, we will see more and more data stored remotely. At the moment, it is a viable and growing option, but not for all organisations and not for all data.

By Bryan Glick, editor, Computing

Read more about the pIT stop here: www.computing.co.uk/pitstop