What Is Driving the Growth of Cloud Storage?
Have you ever wondered what is really driving the widespread adoption of cloud services? It turns out that while everyone has been hyping the latest PaaS or IaaS platform, the real growth in cloud usage has been boring old storage—both in the consumer and business market segments. With the cloud storage business booming, what does that mean for cloud service providers? Are they ready for the coming tidal wave?
Just like in the 1990s when the web transformed how people did business, recent predictions by many analysts indicate that cloud storage companies are going to need to be ready. Gartner predicts that by 2016, 36 percent of all consumer digital content will be in the cloud—up from just 7 percent in 2011.
Consumers typically use the cloud to store the usual random assortment of photos, videos, music, and other personal memorabilia. The usage patterns are consistently archive-like. Although the smartphone ads make it seem like there will be a deluge of hot selfie sharing, how many people even look at their embarrassing vacation pictures ever again?
Even if the average user-generated content is likely to languish—never to be seen again—as long as cloud storage remains cheap, it makes perfect sense to divorce it from any individual device and make it instantly available across whatever connected system the consumer happens to be using at the time. Ironically, personal computing devices are rapidly turning into content delivery vehicles more than anything else. So far, nobody seems to mind.
The biggest players in the space currently are the photo sharing site Flikr, Apple’s iCloud, Google, and the myriad of backup services, such as Mozy and Carbonite. Rumored to have some killer technology, the long delayed Samsung S-Cloud is coming soon.
On the business side, cloud storage sales are heating up as well. According to a recent Forrester report, cloud storage is growing rapidly and has the potential to reach sales of $240 billion by 2020. Predictions are worth the electronic bits they are stored on, but businesses are seeing the value of off-loading archives, using clouds for disaster recovery and business continuity, and for distributing content closer to users.
One example is a traffic prediction software company that is solving its need for cost effective storage of petabytes of data by moving to a private cloud data store. The reasons behind the massive move are different, but the ultimate motivation is the same—the increasing availability of dirt cheap managed cloud storage.
So when you are busy snapping all those pictures of your adorable kids and automatically uploading them to Google+ and iCloud, think about the future when all of your content will be in the cloud and the global power grid fails—bringing down civilization in one fell swoop!
