Storage Industry Group Starts New Cloud Backup-Recovery SIG

Nobody doubts that there is a lot more education needed in all business markets about the intricacies and attributes of cloud data backup/restore, archiving and disaster recovery.
To accomplish this, an influential industry group, the Storage Networking Industry Association, on July 21 announced the formation of a new Cloud Backup and Restore Special Interest Group to approach this problem.
The Cloud BUR (Backup and Restore) SIG is a project of SNIA’s Cloud Storage Initiative that promotes the adoption of cloud storage as a model that provides on-demand storage billed only for what is used. Its main role is to educate the market about Cloud BUR benefits through use cases and to define requirements for future standards.
NetApp cloud czar Val Bercovici, chairman of the Cloud Storage Initiative, has been a key driver of this initiative.
“The Cloud BUR Special Interest Group will provide a platform for growth by defining the requirements for standards and delivering a pipeline of resources to industry participants that include vendors, service providers and end users,” Bercovici said.
The new group will create best practices and conduct surveys to educate the industry through collaboration with end users, the channel, analysts and cloud BUR vendors, Bercovici said.
The new SIG will use cloud industry venues such as the SNIA Symposium, SNIA Storage Developers Conference, CSI CloudBurst, SNW USA, SNW Europe and other cloud-related industry events as well as online media to conduct webinars, seminars and podcasts to further industry awareness about Cloud BUR.
SNIA’s Cloud BUR SIG will consist of standing committees on marketing, education, end-user liaison, channel relations, international relations and other topics.
Founding members of the Cloud BUR SIG include cloud backup and recovery platform vendor Asigra, which will chair the group; and wcloud backup platform and service providers NetApp, i365, CoreVault, TeraSky, EVS, Terremark Worldwide, HMK and Recovery Networks.
The new SIG has conversation pages on Twitter and Google Groups.