Personal cloud storage competition in the five major problems to be solved

50 million users, 240 million U.S. dollars revenue, 4 billion U.S. dollars market value. Dropbox has seen a dazzling treasure for all the participants in the personal cloud storage industry. Foreign Google, Microsoft and Apple and other giants passion to join, the domestic Jinshan, Huawei, Baidu, Tencent, Qihoo 360, Thunder, NetEase, China Telecom and hardware manufacturers are not hesitate. 50 million users, 240 million U.S. dollars revenue, 4 billion U.S. dollars market value. Dropbox has seen a dazzling treasure for all the participants in the personal cloud storage industry. Foreign Google, Microsoft and Apple and other giants passion to join, the domestic Jinshan, Huawei, Baidu, Tencent, Qihoo 360, Thunder, NetEase, China Telecom and hardware manufacturers are not hesitate. Companies with vastly different genes are starting a new round of gold-rush adventures. One side of the space, spell service, and innovation, on the one hand, talk about cooperation, talk about mutual benefit, and alliances is on the stage.

Young people are always like legends to attract the world worship and envy of the eyes. Following Bill Gates in 20, the new young billionaire, Mark Zuckerberg, became a household name in the world as Facebook went public. In China, in particular, many people have never used Facebook, but are familiar with Zuckerberg and his Chinese wife.

Indeed, in Silicon Valley, as well as Mr Zuckerberg, there is a pair of billionaires--the founder and CEO of Dropbox, the personal cloud storage provider, and his Chinese girlfriend, CeCe Cheng. In 4 years, Drew Houston has turned the 15,000-dollar seed-fund start-up into a Silicon Valley supernova with more than 50 million registered users, 240 million dollar revenues and a market value of 4 billion dollars. The personal cloud storage industry led by Dropbox also quickly spread around the world and set off a new wave of capital chasing. Microsoft, Google, Apple and other IT giants have also announced their own personal cloud storage services.

The domestic market also gradually presented a trend of contention. July 2010, Jinshan Fast disk officially on line, with 115 network disk, Huawei Network disk, etc., become the earliest to provide personal cloud storage services business. Since then, not only NetEase, Thunderbolt, Tencent, Qihoo 360, Baidu and other styles of Internet enterprises have announced their own personal cloud storage services, terminal manufacturers cool faction, operators of China Telecom and so have joined the war. Even once shelled cloud storage services are manufacturers "fooled" the Millet technology Chairman Lei also have to admit this trend, in the millet mobile phone pre-installed in Jinshan fast. As a result, 2012 is also known as the "Landing year" of personal cloud storage in the industry.

Personal Cloud storage Evolution

The concept of a network hard disk is no stranger to most people. Around 2005, people used Gmail's massive storage space to store local files, and the concept of a Web disk arose. Since then, the gradual emergence of professional networked storage enterprises and mailboxes, instant Messaging with personal folders to bring the network disk into the 2.0 era, the designated file sharing has gradually become a user's needs.

"2012, the network disk into the 3.0 era, this time, personal cloud storage is the absolute protagonist." "Jinshan CEO Zhanghongjiang in an interaction with netizens, said that the emergence of personal cloud storage is completely predictable and meet the needs of the user market."

May 2009, rain forest Wind founder Railing Maple began to launch 115 network service; At the same time, Huawei will Dbank service renamed Huawei Network Disk, become the earliest human cloud storage service provider. and the sharing services they offer have become one of the most typical personal cloud storage applications in the country.

This is very similar to the previous network disk-users upload files, and then you can share the link to other users, easy to download. Although this shared-class cloud storage and traditional web-sharing services are almost the same for users, they are not comparable.

In simple terms, the traditional network function is still in the storage of data, but the location of the user's files moved from the local to the server, many times the personal service-oriented network disk does not provide backup, while the cloud storage service is a file synchronization, work Synergy, a platform for many applications converge. On the underlying architecture, cloud storage applications include Distributed file system, multi-tenant management and authentication, virtualization and other technical means. The technical framework of the network disk is relatively simple, taking the user management as an example, the network hard disk only relies on the database management for the user to differentiate, but can not achieve a single account of multiple rights division, the cooperation between multiple accounts and other regulated content.

"In fact, most of these services were born around 2009 and are the earliest applications of personal cloud storage," he said. Insiders pointed out that more typical, but also more prominent "cloud computing" characteristics, is Dropbox-led synchronization Services. At present, including Microsoft SkyDrive, Google's googledrive, Jinshan fast, Tencent micro-cloud, 360 cloud disk, and most of the personal cloud storage service providers are synchronous services. And, of course, the Apple icloud.

"Location, Nanjing." A woman lost her iphone iphone on New Year's Day holiday, was picked up by a female, and took a photo of himself, do not want this machine for 5.0.1 system, so was icloud sync to the owner, the owner of his photos to the Internet. Progress: Hot on everyone's web. "New Year's Day just after, this micro Bo is crazy turn." Soon, "the gold and the ignorant" was "human flesh" out, it also allows Chinese users to fully understand the icloud and personal cloud storage before the iphone 4S is officially sold in the domestic market--a service that supports almost all clients, including PCs, smartphones, tablets, etc.

It is understood that through the cloud computing architecture, synchronization class cloud storage can make the user's entire terminal consistent. Under the service, whether through iOS, Android or Windows Phone platform, or from clients on the PC or the Web, users can access files stored in the cloud at any time, or they can share their own data with other users. In other words, many of the things that users used to do with a Web disk, USB stick, or mail could be replaced with a cloud storage service. It is for this reason that Dropbox in the 2007 testing phase of the acquisition of more than 100,000 users, while the domestic market to provide the service at the earliest Jinshan fast, there are currently 15 million users.

Although cloud computing means that the system architecture has to be scaled horizontally, as well as dynamic resource scheduling, security and data protection, storage service level assurance, automated management, monitoring and optimization, geographic independence, multiple access protocols and ways to support the characteristics, but in personal cloud storage, these features are specific to the ability to support multiple terminals, Using virtualization technology.

But these are not all personal cloud storage. In this respect, Zhanghongjiang said: "The public data-sharing form of cloud storage and the past, such as Storm audio and video, Thunderbolt and other services are similar, so this model may not be long-term sustainable." And more worthy of concern and discussion, is the other two models of cloud storage, one is the Golden Hill is doing synchronization services, the other is more in-depth, penetrating services. The typical representative of this service is the recently very popular note-type product Evernote (impression notes) and Youdao cloud notes.

According to the impression notes Guyi, general manager of China, the impression notes are developing in a way that mimics the different memory levels and memory stages of the human brain, helping people to manage their brain knowledge better. Impression notes can be used on any user's computer and mobile phone, save notes, extract pages, files and pictures, just like the human virtual brain. And Youdao Cloud notes are also providing similar services, so that users at any time to their own "see" recorded, and access to any terminal.

"In fact, this is also the cloud storage in the development process, gradually from the network disk application and traditional file system concept to get rid of, directly from the application scene intervention." "NetEase Youdao Cloud notes products in charge of Shangwei air in an interview with reporters said.

In this respect, a number of members of the industry also expressed their approval. "This is actually an evolution of personal cloud storage. "An engineer who has worked in the storage field for years says that future cloud storage will gradually move from one application to the back and become the support of many applications, and that the innovative applications of cloud notes that combine scenarios and cloud storage will be more and more."

What does the Cloud store spell?

In the interview, although everyone is very optimistic about the future development of personal cloud storage, the reporter also noted an interesting phenomenon-often involved in the data center of the service providers, manpower, financial input and revenue, most of the interviewees will answer the "inconvenient to disclose", or to their own not technical staff, The hand does not grasp this number, refused to answer.

"We have income, but we are not profitable," he said. Zhanghongjiang admits. At the same time, Shangwei Airlines also said that the personal cloud storage market is still in its infancy, the current relative to the profit model, nurturing the market is more urgent task.

According to the cool disc founder Huangmingming in the media interview earlier this year, cool disk "only in the server, computer room input will be more than 200 million yuan." However, the overall size of the 2011 domestic personal cloud storage market was only 88 million yuan. In other words, the market can get the cake, even can not let a service provider profit, and according to the insider said, "200 million yuan in the investment in this industry is not what, a part of the capital strength of the enterprise investment even more than 1 billion yuan." "It can be seen that even if the market is growing at a rate of nearly 20% per cent, the overall market size is unlikely to make a profit for most companies." In the 2012, a large number of new entrants will make the competition more severe. In order to win more users, and to ensure that the user stickiness, the enterprises began to compete from different levels.

The first fight is to spell free space. The free storage space offered to users in 2007 was 2GB, but the icloud and Amazon Clouddrive that were launched since then increased free space to 5GB dropox. In the first half of this year, Microsoft's windowsdrive after the upgrade, the user can be free to use the space suddenly increased to 25GB.

Domestically, the local service provider's handwriting is more "lavish". 5GB of free space to become the standard of most enterprises, while the user to carry out the task or improve the membership level to send space strategy. For example, Jinshan fast-disk users can be completed a series of tasks, or micro-blog sharing to obtain additional space rewards, the maximum can be extended to 15GB free space. The recently launched 360 cloud disk, but also directly to the user 36GB free space.

But it is far from enough to spell free space. At present, as the most typical cloud storage services, synchronization services in the cloud storage market is the most competitive, more than 40 domestic enterprises to provide such services. Service providers must also find ways to enhance their awareness of the user.

July 2011, Jinshan announced to become the Beijing Xiangyun project suppliers, in accordance with the needs of Xiangyun project, to Beijing to provide 100GB free cloud storage services. February 21 this year, Jinshan Software announced the establishment of a separate subsidiary of Jinshan Cloud, the main operating cloud computing field, and was previously attributed to Jinshan WPS business under the Jinshan fast disk business is split into Jinshan Cloud Company's core business. Jinshan Software CEO Zhanghongjiang at the same time as Jin Shanyun CEO, Direct management of fast disk business. In addition, Jinshan began to try to look for opportunities from applications. "Our main source of revenue right now is to provide cloud storage as a service to a number of consumer-facing applications and products, and then divide it into revenue through the application or product provider." Zhanghongjiang told reporters, in addition to the millet mobile phone pre-installed, Jinshan fast disk and Konka and other smart TV manufacturers to reach an agreement in its system to install Jinshan fast disk services. At the same time, in Japan and other countries in the regional market, some small and medium-sized enterprises will also use paid services.

Unlike Jinshan, Tencent's cloud disk only has 1GB free space, while the use of QQ browser on the mobile phone users can obtain 2MB free cloud storage space is not an advantage. "But as long as you log on to the QQ cloud platform, you may not be able to get down, we have novels on this platform, games, and other people share interesting documents, and these services are very friendly interface." "Tencent related official said.

and other than internet companies, such as mobile phone manufacturer Cool faction, operator China Telecom and so on, in the personal cloud storage business, also according to own gene implementation different localization. It is understood that the cool faction of the model and icloud very similar to the cool sent mobile phone users to provide personal information synchronization and file storage. "It's a way of sticking with the user," he said. Users put data on our cloud, so the next time we buy a cell phone, we might be given priority. "said the cool staff.

China Telecom's "e-Cloud", for those who chose China Telecom 10 trillion and more optical fiber service users, to provide them with 100GB of free cloud storage space, users can sync collaborative information on multiple devices. "Maybe a single service is not competitive enough, but if we tie them together, the competitive advantage is obvious." China Telecom, said the relevant person.

The competition seems to be more intense in the mobile-internet-linked cloud-note market.

In May this year, Evernote, the world's most sought-after, announced the creation of a local company in China and launched a special Chinese product "impression notes." At the same time, impression notes began to look for partners in China, and successfully allied with UC excellent vision. On August 3, at the Macworld Asia Developer Forum, Guyi announced that the impression notes will provide open APIs to Chinese developers and receive applications from developers the same day.

And the impression notes of the direct competitors Youdao Cloud notes also announced on July 31 the latest 2.0 products. In order to differentiate the competition, Youdao Cloud Notes 2.0 added a lot of new features that meet Chinese users, such as handwriting recognition function and photo Transfer station. "Through the photo transfer station, photos from the user's phone can be synchronized to the computer, eliminating the hassle of using a data-cable copy," he said. Shangwei told reporters. At the same time, Youdao Cloud notes also added to Sina Weibo and NetEase micro-blog support, only need a key to share, you can take notes content in a long micro-blog way to share. Prior to this, the Youdao cloud notes also announced the Open API message.

"At this stage the biggest task of manufacturers is to serve good users." Zhanghongjiang told reporters that at present many enterprises engaged in this industry, personal cloud storage There is a serious miscalculation: "People often feel that individual users of the product technical barriers are relatively low, so a short period of time many companies flooded in." But they do not know, this is a spell technology, cost, spell the user's protracted war. He said that Jinshan from 2007 into the personal cloud storage business, experienced a lot of technology to launch the service, now, "in the face of this protracted war, we have done 3 years of unprofitable preparation."

Mobile Terminal Universal pull cloud storage Competition

In China, the Ministry of Industry and Information technology released in April this year, "mobile terminals white paper" shows that the 2011 national Mobile Intelligent terminal shipments of more than 110 million. Since then, Needham analyst Charlie Wolf in the smartphone industry Quarterly study, released on July 9, in the second quarter of 2012, China's smartphone shipments rose 164% to 33.1 million, more than 25 million shipments in the US smartphone market over the same period, Become the world's largest smartphone market. China's second-quarter shipments of 4200多万部 smartphones to sales channels have recorded record growth of two consecutive quarters, according to the latest data from market research firm Canalys. China's smartphone shipments accounted for 27% of the world's smartphone shipments in the second quarter, close to 30% per cent, compared with just 16% in the US market over the same period.

The rapid popularization of mobile intelligent terminals means that computing can happen anywhere, and the storage and processing of large amounts of data will become the biggest bottleneck of mobile device user experience. As a result, cloud storage has become a battleground for mobile internet as well as the best solution.

Although the personal cloud storage market is promising, it is confronted with challenges such as judicial supervision, data security, bandwidth transmission and so on.

Five problems need to be solved

1 Strict judicial supervision

"The relevant department notice, as a result of the 115 network for the user to provide the public share function of the policy hidden dangers and copyright disputes, now, 115 network disk will no longer provide users of the Internet file for the public to share services. We deeply regret this. "August 7, 115 network disk issued a notice, said no longer provide for extranet users of the file mass-sharing services."

At the same time, 115 network plate also announced in the announcement, the--115 "Circle" of small group social platforms for "strong relationships" has been successfully launched and a small scale pilot, a group of private social networks based on 115 cloud storage platforms, which promotes the sharing of network disk files to a new social level, It will provide a more efficient and secure technology platform for user file sharing.

According to the official data of the 115 network plate, since May 2009, the 115 network has obtained more than 40 million registered users, providing cloud services for 40% domestic forums and more than 20 million visits per day. And this adjustment, let a considerable number of users feel dissatisfied. "This adjustment, can only decide to abandon 115!" A netizen from Guiyang commented.

Despite the voices questioning 115 this is because the capital chain is tight or even broken, only to stop the rapid cash flow of the sharing business, but in any case, judicial supervision is always hanging on the share of cloud storage head of a knife, today is 115, tomorrow may also be other enterprises.

2 Data leaks frequently

Personal cloud storage is difficult to address security and user trust issues.

In early July, Amazon's cloud services were losing data because of lightning strikes. And in recent days, Sheng lost data news has been the industry speculation. 2011, the impact of the huge security incidents are also emerging in the global context. Sony's PSN network was hacked by hackers in April 2011, causing more than 70 million of users ' personal information to leak; in June, Citigroup confirmed the bank system was invaded and a large number of credit card holders were stolen; July, South Korea's SK communications Company's portal, Nate, and social networking site Cyworld was hacked, the number of users stolen information 35 million; in December, China's largest developer it community CSDN Server was hacked, and a large number of user passwords were exposed, leading to Tianya 40 million users, Dangdang 12 million user data has been leaked, Guangdong Provincial Public Security Bureau of the Immigration Service Network online Application data also has 4.44 million information leaks.

While these are not all personal cloud storage events, "putting data on a public cloud will be very serious once something goes wrong." "Microsoft Asia Pacific Research Group Server and Development Tools Division of High-performance Computing chief architect Xu Mingjiang told reporters." At present, up to 360 million files per month are uploaded and shared by users, and 5 million devices per month are connected to SkyDrive. To this end, Microsoft has set up more than 10 data centers around the world to ensure that SkyDrive can provide innovative and seamless application experience. In addition, to ensure data security, Microsoft has 36 backups for each user's data. In this regard, Shangwei also told reporters that a data center of the hard disk damage rate is 3%, that is, in a large data center, every day there will be disk failure, so for the cloud storage service providers, not lost data is critical. To this end, Youdao cloud notes using NoSQL architecture, data for 4 copies of the backup.

3 Bandwidth Transfer Slow

"Bandwidth and transmission speed are also restricting the development of China's cloud storage industry." "said Xu Mingjiang, chief architect of High-performance Computing at Microsoft Asia Pacific Research and Development Tools Division. In the case of synchronous services, although the Broadband China project is fast implementation, but the vast majority of home network bandwidth is still 1MB~2MB, then if the user just sync a few documents fortunately, once you want to focus on the picture, hundreds of MB of files, upload and download will take a long time. And if there are more files stored in the cloud, it is quite time-consuming to synchronize the data to the local user after the new device is replaced.

4 Pay model tested

Chinese consumers ' habits and willingness to pay are inadequate. Jinshan CEO Zhanghongjiang points out that in the U.S. and European markets, users have been accustomed to paying for the early use of electricity, to later telephone broadband, regardless of any service, but the Chinese internet has been laying off free genes from the start. "For example, when buying a computer, most Chinese don't understand why I pay for a computer and have to pay extra for the operating system and software." "In the personal cloud storage, the enterprise sees the opportunity, then jumps in, but may not think clearly, how can let the user finally pay for the service which he enjoys." Therefore, Dropbox's pay habits are hard to replicate.

5 privacy issues cited controversy

"The privacy of the user is also worth exploring for cloud storage. "NetEase Youdao Cloud Notes product leader Shangwei Air Express. In the search for the business model of personal cloud storage, as the cloud holds large numbers of users ' documents and photos, the extent to which these documents and data are used is also a point of contention.

In fact, this is very similar to the mailbox. Some internet companies will follow the message headers and content, do more accurate advertising push, but some companies believe that the data belong to the user, the mail service providers are not qualified to dig the data. In the case of personal cloud storage, it is also highly controversial whether service providers can or should not use the data. In this regard, Zhanghongjiang said, compared to instant messaging software, cloud storage and mailboxes involved less privacy. At present, most IM systems can be based on the user's chat scenes and some dialogue keywords to judge, and then push the relatively accurate ads, but for Jinshan fast, "We are still discussing, at least until now there is no plan." ”