Lucas Mearian at Computerworld (full article here) reports that “[...]

After only two years, Iron Mountain is planning to close its public cloud storage services, having already stopped accepting new customers as of April 1, according to market research firm Gartner.

The company will close its Virtual File Store services, which is targeted at archival of inactive file data, and its Archive Service Platform, which allows software vendors to integrate the Iron Mountain API to leverage the company’s cloud architecture.

Iron Mountains Virtual File Store, offered through the Boston-based vendor’s Digital Division, was marketed as an enterprise-class archiving service that gives users a lower-cost means of storing and managing static data files than keeping them on in-house systems.

Iron Mountain told Gartner that it will continue to offer services to its current cloud storage customers as it also helps them migrate to another provider or return their data. [...] Iron Mountain’s announcement makes it the third public cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) provider to abandon the market over the past year, Gartner said. The others that have shut down are: Vaultscape, which launched its service in 2009 and closed in 2010, and EMC, which announced Atmos Online in 2009 and took it offline a year later.[...]“.

This is another proof that cloud isn’t for anybody and that cloud is still to be defined and understood.

I agree on Gartner estimate that was done  a couple of years ago that less than one third of cloud providers would see a return on their investment within 2011.

Cloud is complex and still a buzzword for most of the people involved. Investments needed are high and companies do not feel to be sure within the cloud, mainly because is a so breaking paradigm and every vendor has its own thought on this.

I think we are facing a mood that especially in its more uthopic ways (such as Iaas aka infrastructure as a service) will be difficult to be accepted by the system within reasonable times to justify and investment.

This post as a comment also here