Iron Mountain introduces a cloud storage API

Iron Mountain, a longtime provider of physical- and digital-records management, on Wednesday announced a cloud storage API that enables developers to take advantage of Iron Mountain's off-site storage facilities.

Despite the recent issues related to T-Mobile/Danger/Microsoft's data loss, cloud-based storage is not only here to stay, it's a good use case for organizations that don't have the internal processes or means to deal with off-site data management.

And while you can never know all of the things that can go wrong with your data (meaning that no one would have expected Danger to lose the T-Mobile data), established vendors like Iron Mountain have not only the customer base to support their abilities but also the processes to support customers effectively.

Iron Mountain's cloud storage application programming interface is the next evolutionary step beyond a cloud NAS (network-attached storage) that we've seen from providers like Mozy and others. The cloud storage API is similar in function to Amazon's Simple Storage Service interfaces, enabling developers to access data using restful interactions.

I've written in the past that without APIs, there is no cloud computing, and while APIs remain one of the key technical facilitators, we've now seen that operations is the other important factor.

As more established enterprise vendors, such as IBM, Iron Mountain, and EMC, bring their offerings to market, cloud growth will continue to grow. These companies bring a wealth of experience in managing data and data centers, which should help allay fears of risk and data loss.

As CNET News' Rafe Needleman pointed out earlier this week, IT management is still on the hook for data issues--regardless of whether they occur on a site or in the cloud. Ultimately, to be able to trust the cloud, you have to trust the people who run it.