Looking back to one of my predictions for 2014, I had posited that traditional storage solutions labeled cloud will no longer fly this year, and some of the big-iron vendors will be forced to offer their wares as pay-as-you-go services. Perhaps this was stating an obvious eventuality as the market moves to a more cost-effective consumption model – but lo and behold, only two months into the year, it is already happening.
You may have seen that a large vendor introduced a pay-as-you-go model for their on-premise storage. While geared toward managed service providers seeking to provide cloud storage to their customers, this new payment model is the first volley in what will likely be a pay-as-you-go tidal wave for hardware. Such models are certainly laudable efforts, bestowing customers the benefit of not having to purchase multiple years’ worth of capacity from day one at the current pricing.