The Current State Of Online Storage

Online storage has been a business proven useful for some time already. Having one’s essentials - and even some luxuries - available from any place and any terminal one can connect to the Web with is appealing to many. Why wouldn’t it be? For the half of the computing world that hasn’t been persuaded over to the portable sector of the tech industry (in other words, the people who continue to reside on desktop systems and only desktop systems), it’s a wonderful, relatively inexpensive solution to ensure one’s data is “always there”. And, of course, the point that it’s beneficial to have secure, remote redundancy of the important bits in our lives charms quite a few folk, too.

So why hasn’t the Web-based storage system hit its stride, so to speak? Internet technologies in the area of languages have been developed to the point at which they’re giving us quite attractive options. Why haven’t they taken off?

Two reasons, really. First, remote data storage, while much cheaper today than yesterday, isn’t yet very financially appealing to a large swath of those that might be conceptually interested in such a service. That, I suspect, is the primary barrier to entry at the moment that’s keeping lots of people that want to be in, out. Second (and, in my view, a very, very crucial factor that very much needs addressing), is the fact that every remote storage service alive and kicking at present offers a substandard experience to the one each and every one of us has come to rely on for the past decade or so.

It’s true. You know it just as well as I do. Whether it’s Box.net or Mozy Online Backup or the “new and improved” stuff now being delivered to us by Microsoft, Google, and Apple, Web-based storage solutions simply aren’t good enough. They don’t do everything we want them to, and those tasks they do perform, they don’t perform fast enough.

Now, I willfully admit that online storage has come a long way and is now much less an irritant than it was in years past. But truth be told, we’ve still a long, long way to go before it’s something we use without second thought.

When will that be? I don’t know. And I don’t like making many predictions when it comes to technological development(s), primarily because the digital landscape seems to transform more and more quickly as time progresses, and thus there’s really no telling when exactly “the game will change”. But I presume it will occur right around the time that Web based utilities of the office app variety hit the big time. That moment could come about in three years, maybe five. I doubt it’ll be ten, however. The way things are going right now, I tend to favor the odds of sooner rather than later.