By Richard Scannell

There’s been much wailing and gnashing of teeth in the days surrounding the reported failure of Nirvanix, a cloud storage company which has reportedly advised their clients they have a couple of weeks to get their data out of the service or risk the inevitable loss from a shutdown. The Cloud naysayers are dancing in their proverbial cubicle lanes at the news – running into the CIOs office declaring that there is still too much risk associated with going to cloud. Nirvanix isn’t the first, nor surely will it be the last business to fail. The IT streets are littered with the skeletons of pioneers of new S-curves, only to see future iterations go on to fame and glory (all you Netapp owners, remember Auspex?). In the days when we all owned our own infrastructure, this issue of failed brands was resolved with a hardware refresh where we simply migrated away from the old, unsupported platform to a new, hopefully more successful provider. The question of whether Nirvanix’ failure is good news or bad for Cloud in general therefore lies squarely on the ability of their customers to successfully get OFF the service. Fluidity - that ability to seamlessly move from one operating environment to another, unburdened by the heavy weight of underlying capital assets, was surely one the most appealing attributes of cloud that got those clients to move onto Nirvanix to begin with. If in fact, the migration of Nirvanix customer data to other providers happens with relative ease and no data loss, one of the final bastions of resistance to cloud, i.e. fear of failure of my chosen provider, may fall. The irony is that Nirvanix’s failure could then contribute more to advancing Cloud adoption than their success ever might have. Surely this can be their proverbial sunshine, on a cloudy day…