One of the major hypes in the IT industry is cloud computing. The cloud being a remote, top-notch infrastructure for data storage only or the combination of Storage and Computation that can be enlisted on demand. Organizations like Amazon who have world class systems engineering and IT infrastructure management can provide cloud infrastructure at a fraction of the cost more ordinary organizations would suffer.

The prime example of a Storage Cloud is Amazon S3. It basically is a very cheap facility to store and access bits of data. One option of leveraging the Storage Cloud would be for off site back up. The back up of for example the database can be sent bit for bit to S3, held in the cloud for as long as needed and retrieved when a recovery is called for. (note: apparently the data can be retrieved on hard copy media – DVD, tape – from the cloud as well as on line. Note: this article has been updated on September 23rd to include additional details released by Oracle (more…)