Cloud Storage Review and Outlook

2013 review

Cloud computing, especially cloud storage, has been available for many years now. We witnessed the demise of Nirvanix, Snowden exposes the NSA prism project, and the alleged collaborations among major US telecommunications service operators. Despite these negative news, Amazon continues to move forward and rapidly add new services and lower prices. There is still room for new suppliers in this market, such as Dump Truck and Copy, which was founded about a year ago, and the two suppliers are mainly focused on consumer markets. Many new enterprise cloud storage services were launched in 2013, such as Verizon, EMC, Colt Telecom, and Lenovo show that vendors predict that businesses have a huge demand for cloud-related services. OpenStack open source cloud computing platforms continue to receive vendor support, such as Red Hat's introduction of new OpenStack-related products and aiming for the dominance of OpenStack. At the same time, Amazon S3 remains the standard storage API for developers and storage product compatibilities, as we predicted when we added the S3 API to the SME platform three years ago. Another interesting development in 2013 was SugarSync's announcement to stop offering free accounts and close all existing accounts. This is a sad move for many free customers. 2014 Cloud Storage Forecast Given the above reviews of the cloud storage market in 2013 and SugarSync initiatives, we are likely to see other cloud storage services shut down their free storage offerings. The lesson here is that free products are not always free. We may see DropBox and Box listed in 2014. Due to the Prism program's exposure, we will see more non-US businesses will stop hosting their data in the United States. Security has become the number one concern for businesses that process data. We will see more file-sharing providers following the footsteps of SMBs in an attempt to transform the logging / auditing / security enhancements in their products. More companies will want to encrypt their remote data in 2014, and they will control the keys themselves. This will be part of the 2014 Business Security Handbook. In 2014, we'll see businesses want more from their storage solutions, how do these solutions solve their business problems, how they fit in with corporate governance and help deploy common policies? Big Data will continue to be a storage vendor The main speculation object, we will see a lot of new product launches.