Hard drives better than cloud for small businesses?

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An executive from EMC has claimed small businesses would be better off financially buying a hard drive than taking up any cloud offerings.

Despite the company talking endlessly about cloud computing over the past few days at its annual conference in Boston, Joel Schwartz, senior vice president and general manager of common storage platform operations at EMC, said it wasn't necessarily the best option for smaller operations.

“Hard drives, just stand alone hard drives, are cheap so in the US you can buy a terabyte for under $100,” he told IT PRO in an interview at the party's annual conference.

“So... what you pay for Mozy [EMC's cloud backup service] or one of them, say 10 or 50GB a month for $5, multiply it out and believe me hard drives are cheap. So the idea behind a cloud for us is it is just another place to protect it, it is not the most economic. The most economical is just buying a hard drive.”

Schwartz also disagreed with the statement made by his colleague Art Coviello, president of RSA, EMC's security division, that EMC as a company believed “all clouds should be private.”

“The private cloud is for IT, companies that have IT staff. Small business and I am talking about... five or 10 employees – of which there are more businesses of this size than any other – they are not going to have private cloud. They'd prefer to not have a computer at all but they are stuck with it so you might as well figure out how to use it [however] they are not private cloud at all," he said.

“Private cloud is for mid-sized and enterprise class customers and for them we strongly do believe that is the right thing.”

For more news from EMC World 2010, click here.

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