Did you know that your computer needs are exactly like everyone else’s? You want unlimited storage that is available, backed up continuously for restore and accessible anywhere and from any device. So, where do I get this? Well, you will have to understand that is where we are headed but there are some hurdles to get there.
First there’s a company that’s afraid to provide this commodity service to it’s customers because they WILL be called a monopoly again. Not only that, they don’t quite realize they are a cloud services company. And we have our traditional enterprise software companies who don’t realize they are in the “storage” business, instead they define themselves in a smaller category of “enterprise backup and restore”. But there are some who have played in this space without real commitment like EMC, who like to focus their energy on the more lucrative enterprise market.
Which means smaller companies like Dropbox, Box.net, Sugar Sync, Bitcasa, Spot Documents and SpiderOak are providing “cloud storage” to millions of regular users. I’ve read the number of users these companies are servicing have approached 25 million users.
An amazing thing is happening. There is a convergence of events driving the development of new online storage companies. These events include the availability of low cost enterprise storage, new cloud infrastructure companies (providing storage) are in business, much more data is being created by people on multiple devices, which is enabling many of these cloud storage organizations to achieve major economies of scale and greater control of growing data volumes, not to mention PC hard drives are being made with low quality standards which drive more customers to cloud based storage. New virtualization technologies, both proprietary and open source, are also deeply involved helping drive these new service and businesses.
So now we see entrepreneurs creating companies that act as a “middle man” by building an interface to a cloud infrastructure and selling the services, supporting users and building applications to connect to the cloud storage solution. From what I can tell, Amazon is the driving factor here. And Amazon is doing an amazing job. Their storage services are priced low, provide high levels of availability, allow for a great management interface, API’s and are innovating like no one else. Their stock price is rising for a reason and it’s justified. 
Amazon recently introduced Cloud Drive, an online file storage service where everyone gets 5 GB of free storage space to store all kinds of files in the cloud. You can purchase additional storage space at the cost of $1 per GB. However, if you are to upload non-music files to Cloud Drive – like your documents, pictures, DRM protected music, or even complete file folders – you’ll have to use your web browser. That’s obviously not a very convenient option especially when you wish to upload multiple files from various desktop folders. There’s a free utility called Gladinet Starter that will map your Cloud Drive account as a local drive so you can access your online files and folders from within Windows Explorer itself. But Amazon is still not a complete solution for all platforms. They want to be a player but like EMC they want to continue selling their existing products to the other players.
EMC could have provided these services and they are especially at fault since they are in the “storage business”. They own Mozy that does online backup and restore. And this is a great service but so limited at this point. You can connect to the Mozy over the web and “restore” the document. But that’s the issue. Stop calling it restore. They own all the pieces such as enterprise disks, security and virtualization in the form of VMWare products. They need to take a deep hard look at these small contenders and also Amazon and compete with them. My guess is that Amazon is using Tier 1 and Tier 2 storage which includes EMC products and they can’t get in the business of competing with their customers so then they just sell the hard drives and back-end services. I’m not sure I agree with this as a long term approach but in the short term they have a responsibility to their stockholders. Those are the business choices companies make. And that’s why sometimes they go out of business when the market changes.
Microsoft is also guilty in that they could have provided these services a while back. Now as far as Microsoft is concerned, they could also buy storage solutions from an enterprise storage vendor, build a virtual storage infrastructure and leverage their virtualization technology for most of these core services, if they wanted. They have skydrive, not to be confused by live drive, and Microsoft doesn’t do much more than provide a web interface. Their customers have to go through the trouble of installing windows live essentials and their live mesh software that syncs photos and documents. How about add this to their OS as a native feature? Oh, monopoly…forgot. This is the same company that sold a product called SharePoint Portal server 2001 that extended windows by allowing a user to map a drive or create a drive letter to connect to SharePoint. Which means they had a product that allows users to seamlessly store documents on a company’s web storage server(in the company “cloud”). Microsoft has the vision and capability to extend their SkyDrive functionality by building the services, the web interface and the mobile apps for iPhone and Android if they wanted. We could have had a folder like drop box creates that connects directly to the cloud or even a “My Cloud Documents”; or even a disk drive to hide the fact that the data wasn’t on the computer. They are seriously missing this. I worry that Microsoft’s decline will come within the next 5 years and it will be swift and painful.
Google wants to build their Chrome PC where everything is in the cloud. So, your storage is in Google docs, your applications are on Google or at some other online company and you no longer need anything on your PC other than a Google Chrome web browser. It’s an interesting idea but a reach.
For now I just want unlimited storage that is available, secure, backed up continuously for restore and accessible anywhere and from any device. Oh, did I mention I wanted this to be so simple to use that it just works and the cloud drive/folder shows up on my computer/device natively like any other folder or disk drive.
