Back in September, Nirvanix announced to its customers that they had two weeks to move its data before the company went down the plughole.

As the enterprise cloud storage provider waved the white flag, Gartner research director Kyle Hilgendorf noted in a blog post that the analyst house’s paper on cloud exit strategies was one of the least popular in the collection.

“I suspect it is because cloud exits are not nearly as sexy as cloud deployments,” he demurred. “They are an afterthought.”

This is an issue that patently needs to change. As Hilgendorf asserted, recovery in the cloud may not be sexy, but they’re just as vital as moving to the cloud, whether it’s through natural disasters or company shutdowns.

The good news is that there are plenty of options out there, from niche providers to the big guys, such as VMware, and IBM, who added …