Cloud computing is great, right? As a way to get something up and running quickly, affordably, and with a minimum of fuss, it can rarely be beaten. But some of the most compelling attributes of the public cloud are best suited to ephemeral or (relatively!) short-term use cases. You can spin up a cloud server in minutes. You can scale a cloud-based application to cope with the peaks and troughs of demand. You can control all of this through a web console, with no more than a credit card and a laptop. Silicon Valley, SoMa, Silicon Alley, Silicon Roundabout, Silicon Allee, Silicon Wadi, Silicon Forest, Silicon Welly, and the Silicon Bog (only one of those was made up, I think) are full to bursting with bright young things building exciting new products (and silly photo sharing sites) powered only by the cloud and expensive coffee. And then you have government, private, and commercial Archives, with an over-riding imperative to keep stuff for a very, very long time. These Archives clearly can (and do) use cloud computing in the same ways as everyone else. They use clouds to cost-effectively transform data from one format to another, they use clouds to stream […]