More than One-third of 2016 years of digital content will go to the cloud

Global http://www.aliyun.com/zixun/aggregation/11995.html "> Technology research and consulting firm Gartner said that by 2016, The desire to share content and access content from multiple devices will prompt consumers to store more than One-third of their digital content in the cloud. In 2011, Gartner said, only 7% of consumer digital content was stored in the cloud, but by 2016 it would have grown to 36%.

"Consumers used to store content on their PCs in the past, but as we entered the post-PC era, consumers were using multiple interconnect devices, most of them equipped with cameras," said Shalini Verma, chief research analyst at Gartner. This results in a sharp increase in the new user-generated content that needs to be stored. In addition, with the advent of personal clouds, fast-growing consumer digital content will quickly be separated from connected devices. ”

The widespread use of smartphones and tablets with cameras allows users to take a large number of photos and videos. Gartner predicts that global consumer demand for digital storage will grow from 329 exabytes in 2011 to 4.1 zettabytes in 2016. This includes all digital content stored in PCs, smartphones, tablets, hard drives, network attached storage (NAS), and the Cloud library.

Most consumer demand for cloud storage will be met in the short term by social networking sites like Facebook, which provide free storage space for uploading photos and videos to share information. Verma says the online backup services company is the most well-known cloud storage provider, and its total storage allocated to both ordinary consumers and "professional consumers" (prosumers) is smaller than the amount provided by social networking sites.

The average storage per household will grow from the 2011 464 gigabytes to the 2016 3.3 terabytes. In 2012, Gartner argued that the widespread adoption of a camera-equipped tablet and smartphone would drive consumer storage requirements. In the first half of 2012, the shortage of hard drives caused by the floods in Thailand stimulated the demand for cloud storage deployments, leading to unusually general growth in 2011-2012.

Consumers are expected to take the lead in trying the free basic packaging package offered by online backup companies. With OEM vendors, online storage and synchronization vendors partnering, these services will be available as applications on tablets, smartphones and broadband-connected TVs. Cloud service Providers (CSPs) will also increasingly provide cloud storage. The use of cloud online storage and Synchronization services will provide the basic experience for consumers to start using cloud storage as part of their personal cloud.

With the direct to cloud model becoming more mainstream, while Gartner expects the share of internal deployment storage to fall sharply from 93% in 2011 to 64% in 2016, internal deployment storage remains the primary repository of consumer digital content. In the meantime, cloud storage will grow aggressively. Cloud storage growth will mainly come from North America and western Europe. Japan and South Korea have the highest growth rates in the Asia-Pacific region, where cloud service providers have been able to provide years of online storage and synchronization services.

Shalini Verma says: "Local storage will be further integrated with home networks, which brings opportunities for local storage providers that partner with home networking and automation service providers." Cloud storage will grow with the advent of personal clouds, which in turn simplifies the direct to cloud model, allowing users to store user-generated content directly in the cloud. Because storage becomes part of the personal cloud, it will be further commercialized. As a result, online storage and synchronization companies need to rethink their future strategies. ”

(Responsible editor: Lu Guang)