So no, I don't think this is going to battle storage providers.
So no, I don't think this is going to battle storage providers.
Businesses have a choice: they can invest in buying storage hardware for a bunch of their computers every few years, or they can invest in a fast-enough Internet connection and outsource the storage. That Internet connection will bring them additional benefits over just storage.
I claim that the economics are switching in favor of the Internet option, and will continue to do so over the next decade.
You know that you are talking about the typical speed of many industrialized countries, like Germany, Spain, France? I doubt those whole countries are not the target market.
We use expensive 500gb tapes to take weekly backups of our entire site which are kept for 1 year. I'm not sure how many times the tapes can be overwritten but there would be a price-point for these archive disks that would make the tapes obsolete. It would also save a lot of space and therefore money as we are charged to store the bulky tapes off site.
There's is also the "political" problem (as outlined by everyone else), I can't see every company wanting to outsource the storage of their secret data. Then you're also at the mercy of Amazon, that for whatever reason can stop providing you service (It's a tiny possibility, but it's still there).
Small businesses still generate data that needs to be archived. Uploading a TiB of data at ~40KiB/s would take the best part of a year.
A reliable fast connection is still very expensive, and there are several other considerations. When we looked at offsite backup a major consideration was restore times. Even if you can do differential backups, in a disaster you might need to get everything back ASAP and even the best internet connection can't get near the throughput of onsite disks/tapes.