No More Iron in the Cloud
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Join For Freei’ve always liked iron mountain because the name makes me think of the hobbit (remember dain of the iron hills ?) in fact i think that iron mountain is one of the all time great company names, and their marketing group deserves credit for leveraging this to build a very strong brand around what is arguably a pretty dull and conventional service—that of records management. the extension of this brand into the cloud seemed obvious and fitting, so at first blush its disappointing that they’ve made a decision to reverse course.
in reality though, it seems that iron mountain is performing more of a
realignment of its cloud strategy. simple cloud-based storage is just
not very hard to do, and so the field is rapidly becoming as crowded as
the battle of five armies. differentiation is the key to great brands,
and its hard to standout from s3 or carbonite or mozy or any of the
dozens of providers peddling mass storage services in the cloud. iron
mountain seemed to recognize that their brand could be better
served—that is, both leveraged
and
protected—by ducking out of
the commodity bazaar and moving up the street to provide a more
specialized and business-aligned service.
this is all very interesting because over the next few years we will see that brand—that most mysterious response in the consumer’s mind—is going to be the deciding factor that makes or breaks a cloud provider’s success. and as amazon has demonstrated, cloud branding can come out of the most unlikely places.
Published at DZone with permission of Scott Morrison . See the original article here.
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