Welcome to our first eNewsletter of 2022! If you're anything like me, you're doubtless hoping that this year will feel like a progression from the last, in the sense that we need to be moving on - both in a business and a personal well-being sense - from the bizarre inertia that Covid-19 has brought to the world. Whether it is IT projects that keep being postponed, football fixtures being cancelled, or just not being able to spend time with our loved ones, the pandemic continues to act as an anchor on so many aspects of our day-to-day lives.

One area that has seen unprecedented growth during the pandemic is cloud services. AWS closed out 2020 with revenues of $45.3 billion, up nearly 30% year-over-year and more than $13.5 billion in annual operating profits - which is 63% of Amazon's total operating profits for the year. 2021's figures are likely to be as good if not better for them.

However, as Michael Del Castillo of Komprise says in his article in this eNewsletter, "The cloud, for all its merits, has added data silos - made even more scattered by the multi-cloud movement. Clouds have different storage classes and tiers for file and object storage, all of which need to be leveraged for a cost-effective file data management strategy. These result in more silos to manage."

The cloud is not, and never has been, a cure-all for IT's ills - but there is no question that it remains central to any organisation's planning now and for the future.

David Tyler, Editor
Storage magazine

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