Cloud storage provider EMC is huge, and the company has now shut down its Atmos Online cloud storage service not much more than a year after the service’s launch.  This just shows that you’re still taking on some risk if a cloud service itself is new and unproven.

For much of Atmos Online’s existence, there were a few ways to get access to EMC’s Atmos product on a metered basis. You could get it from AT&T, where it was sold as Synaptic Storage Services; you could also buy it from Peer1 Hosting, where it was sold under the CloudOne Storage brand; you could buy it from Hosted Solutions under the banner of Stratus Cloud Storage; or you could buy it from EMC via Atmos Online.

Let me just come out and say it: “there aren’t going to be standards“. This is already a commodity product, unavoidably. If they didn’t have any sort of lock-in, the service might not be possible at all. How hard would it be for services to migrate on a pricing basis, leading to an inevitable ‘crash’ when one of the services gets flooded?

As with the Wall Street meltdown, some regulation and oversight might make sense before these services get intertwined to the degree that they can be taken down in tandem from a 3rd party attack or mistake. We should start thinking of the internet more and more as infrastructure on the level of harbors, airports, railroads and highways. Cloud offerings push us farther and farther into this realm.