Amazon S3 - Penetrating Enterprise Backup Market

Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is a virtual vault where one can store personal or corporate information. It is doing well with developers focused on building storage applications for personal use. I have a hard time backing up stuff and have had problems with my USB storage devices, so browser based applications like S3Fox seems really attractive.

I think S3 is great for enterprise backup. However, Amazon will have to figure out an SLA that gives enterprises the same comfort like the Iron Mountain folks give Fortune 500 companies. Fortune 500 companies readily turn in their back up tapes to Iron Mountain, but hesitate when you talk about data backup using S3.

Amazon should look into building a physical offering (software or appliance) that acts as a staging area and is deployed within the enterprise with an option of asynchronously uploading information to S3. The SLA boundary would then be around the appliance and the S3 service.

Or perhaps Amazon should partner with IBM and build a plug-in for their back up tapes that now include encryption.