For every cloud there is a silver lining comes to mind in this age of Virtual Servers and Cloud Storage. R3 have grown much faster than anticipated this last 5 years not because of hard drive failures. In reality hard drives are not at risk of failure from manufacturer level design faults. It is the protection of hardware and backing up of data that is the real reason a data recovery team like R3 at Security House are kept busy 7 days per week. But the actual reason turnover has tripled in the last 6 years is the workload being put on servers and NAS boxes plus the inevitable human errors. Virtual Servers and drives may appear to be a data file but its also a file system and an environment that can communicate with other virtual and physical connected devices. What we are seeing in the lab is quite disturbing, dozens of virtual servers a month are going offline and are not properly backed up.
Whilst it may appear a bonanza time in reality it is a storm that could be developing as more businesses move to cloud based storage not actually knowing the implications in the event of a failure. Consider that most RAID5 storage arrays are recoverable even with multiple disk failures. But the damage to VMs can be catastrophic.