The Gartner Prediction: One Third Of User Data In The Cloud By 2016 In a recent research study, Gartner speculated that the prevalent shift towards the cloud, primarily fuelled by the present-day end-user craving to store, share and access data on a multitude of devices, will lead to a jaw-dropping storage of an estimated one third of the total digital content onto the cloud some time by the end of 2016. Gartner pointed out that user content transferred to the cloud in the year 2011 alone accounted for about 7 percent of the total. This, however, is estimated to increase
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Cloud Storage: Comparing Box and Egnytes Cloud storage is a model of networked storage utilizing the wide reach of the internet to bring storage services to virtually anyone who has an internet connection. This type of online storage stores data in virtualized pools usually hosted by third party providers. Storage hosting companies operate large and distributed data centers and they sell or lease certain amounts of storage capacity to clients. The provider virtualizes the storage resources and provides them according to the needs of customers who store data objects or files on them. Even though the customer might be renting
GDrive – A Google Docs Clone Google has a reputation for delivering top-quality services to its users. To continue this tradition, the much anticipated GDrive was launched in April. Much to the cloud storage community’s disappointment, Google did not come up with the radical new features that the crowd had been expecting. Instead, Google resorted to recycling it’s previously established cloud storage service (Google docs) into a hybrid which could handle a wider range of file formats. Starting from the interface of GDrive, Google did not change much. In fact, the whole Google Docs platform has been deliberately used, and
Unified Storage for the Cloud Means Higher-Level Interfaces In common use, the term “unified storage” means providing block-level and file-level access to the same storage system with a single management and control interface. Traditionally, block-level access is via fiber channel or iSCSI, and file-level access is via NFS or CIFS protocol. Recently, storage vendors are also adding _object_-level storage where the objects are entities with metadata like type, access control policies. Objects are read and written by applications using REST HTTP or SOAP and used directly at the application level. The most popular API is Amazon’s S3 (Simple Storage Service). With the higher-abstraction level of objects, the underlying implementation (e.g.,
BYOD Is In—Bring Your Own Cloud, Not So Much As employees continue to bring personal mobile devices and laptops into the workplace, most businesses have resigned themselves to dealing with the security and management headaches of the new BYOD reality. But now, with the growing popularity of cloud storage and synchronization services, companies have found themselves facing the next wave in the consumerization of IT: “Bring your own cloud” or BYOC. In large part due to the flexibility of cloud collaboration services, it’s not uncommon for employees to telecommute from home or from one office to another. Many of these
Data Security in the Cloud: Solutions for Consumers and SMBs A recent small business cloud computing survey from Microsoft found that a chief concern of potential SMB cloud customers is the security and privacy of their data. A full 70% of small businesses are concerned about where their data is stored. Just over half of all SMBs cite data privacy as a potential deal breaker for adopting cloud services. And only 36% of businesses think their data is as or more secure in the cloud than their current on premises solution. Most data security and privacy concerns revolve around four
Top Cloud Storage Providers In The Enterprise Market Cloud backup is an essential part of a disaster recovery/business continuity (DR/BC) plan. It is important that enterprise data is securely backed up and easily accessible. In a previous article, I reviewed the top players in the consumer market for cloud storage. In this post, I will review the top five players in the enterprise market for cloud storage. 1. Box When it comes to enterprise storage, Box are king. They are reported to have 120,000 enterprise customers, including 410 Fortune 500 companies. They have a very simple and intuitive interface that makes
