Sortage As A Service
When did storage as a service fall into the trough?
So, industry advisers Gartner released their cloud computing hype cycle (LINK: http://www.business2community.com/tech-gadgets/gartner-releases-their-hype-cycle-for-cloud-computing-2012-0241167) at the beginning of August. While these models are largely aimed at large organisations, it’s interesting to reflect on what they mean for smaller businesses and consumers.
I know, I thought, why don’t I put together the hype cycle picture for the little people? It would be much simpler, for sure – probably including software as a service (or online applications), social networking, hosted email and collaboration, hosted security and storage. Most of these, I thought, would probably lie somewhere along the ‘slope of enlightenment’, that is, generally accepted by those who found them useful, ignored by those that didn’t.
The only niggle was around hosted storage. It doesn’t help that I’m just back from holiday and, as usual, I have been a little trigger happy in the photographic department. I’ll spare the maths but 800 photos at 12 megapixels, plus a number of short HD films amounts to about 7 gigabytes, barely dipping into the space available on the cards in my two cameras. However, I confess that the question from a certain online storage provider: “Did I want to upload my photos into the cloud?” was met with a good-humoured snort.
It’s not just about the time it would take to upload all those pictures; a cursory glance at pricing models suggests that anything over 100Gb of storage would cost between 200-500 dollars annually. Moving from the individual to the business, the price goes up proportionately with the number of users – even with discounts, it quickly becomes cheaper to buy a small NAS. An appropriate point, you may think, to play the ‘horses for courses’ card – of course it is important to weigh the relative benefits and costs of hosted versus in-house services, and make decisions accordingly.
However for reasons of bandwidth and cost above all, it remains difficult to imagine ‘public cloud storage’ as anything other than a synchronisation or collaboration tool for a subset of corporate content. Given that the picture isn’t much different for larger companies, it is unsurprising that cloud storage finds itself free-falling into Gartner’s trough of disillusion. While the capability is given the benefit of the doubt (it will one day reach the plateau), hosted storage vendors may have to think a little harder about the services they offer, if they don’t want to become just another niche technology.