Backup Alternatives

Much depends on the organization you're trying to sell it to. To a small company or school district with only limited Internet Access, it's a hard sell because of their connection. The merits of data vaulting have to outweigh the cost of increasing their bandwitdh.

To a large company with an established IT staff and exisitng backup plans, only when the cost of data vaulting competes favorably with equipment upgrades would the alternative be viable.

The whole concept to me seems to be a "niche" and an extrmely hard sell. You can quote page after page of statistics of the cost of disaster recovery, but too often the bottom line comes down to monthly operating expenses. Hiring a messenger to pick up tapes and store them in a bank safedeposit vault is a much cheaper alternative than the data vault.

Also, security is an issue, and the company trying to sell data vaulting has to convince the customer that not only is their data safe, but convince the customer of their own integrity. If the data being vaulted contains the blueprints for the next mega christmas toy hit, an unscrupulous employee of the vaulting company could obtain access.

As I said, it's a niche market, and my gut feeling is it won't be an easy sell, no matter what market you try to concentrate in.

The last factor is profitability of the Data Vault company. Its very nature demands an expensive and reliable infrastructure. This type of expense won't be supported by mom and pop operations who wantto save their last 5 years of sales data, especially when it could be saved on a couple of floppy disks. The corporate market is a hard sell, and unless you gain entry during their startup phase, you have to convince them to replace their existing staff and infrastructure with an untried and untested entity.

Good Luck.