Comment Re:Seems expensive (Score 4, Informative) 71
but doing this yourself seems to be a lot cheaper.
Oh? Have you factored in the cost of ensuring that you always have an offsite and fully up to date copy, not to mention secondary and tertiary copies for transit time in case your primary datacenter/server happens to kick the bucket/get stolen/evaporate?
It's easy to compare the cost of an offered service to what you can pick up seeming similar equipment for from Amazon or Newegg... the realities though are far more complex.
and cannot put anything confidential there (unless you are not bothered by various TLAs searching through it).
There are ways to manage even that, see this brief bit of Wikipedia for a start.
I don't know if there are any other commercial or enterprise products out there that do it, but I know this one stores all of it's data in the cloud (with a local cache) but does all of the encryption on site. Only if you choose does the encryption key leave your site and then only in a way you choose making it rather problematic for a TLA or Microsoft to get to your data.
It is an interesting world when you are dealing with data you cannot legally delete for a period of time and simply want to rid yourself of the burden of having to store it locally. Suing Google or Amazon because their cold storage failed is a far better option than having your IT guy tell you that the HD they stored the crucial data to doesn't spin up anymore... and that the backup disk ended up in the secretary desktop.