Cloud Storage: Mature Saturation or Early Adopter Phase? | Hacked … – Hacked

This article was posted on Thursday, 02:48, UTC.

Cloud storage options have been available at a consumer level for decades, in fact, if you consider them properly. One of the earliest such options was called iDrive, which began operations in 1995. A private company, they are still in operation, offering services that directly parallel that of their newer rival, Dropbox. Additionally there have been efforts like Carbonite and Google Drive.

It seems that the curve of technological adoption begins with centralized services and is later revolutionized by decentralized ones. In the same way that Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies in general are in the early stages of disrupting how people transmit money, Storj, Filecoin, Siacoin, and others are in the process of disrupting cloud storage. However, what is unclear to this author at this point is how much this market really can be worth long-term.

While there has been a period of time where extremely fast local storage was more expensive, these prices are coming down now. You can buy a 1TB SSD drive for a few hundred bucks, and with two of them you can have a RAID setup for redundancy. The price of extremely reliable, extremely fast, and extremely large drives is only going to continue coming down. How long before its so inexpensive that the concept of charging for access to it is less enticing? Even large firms with scaling needs might eventually be able to do it cheaper in house as the cost of hardware comes down.

Okay, so its unlikely that this will be a huge problem for the industry. In digital services, virtually everything has a market. Fair enough. But we must also consider what advantages these decentralized offerings have over their centralized counterparts. For one thing, encryption and security are sort of at the heart of the networks. As such, only the file owners are able to view their contents. This has great value to international firms, legal firms, and more. There may be cases where someone determines a file is safer in an encrypted cloud than in a local semi-encrypted disk.

Then there are businesses where no amount of redundancy is too much, such as web hosting companies. Apart from Siacoin, Storj, and Filecoin, there is also SONM, for which storage is just one more computer resource they would like to allow people to distribute in a decentralized manner. SONM appears to this author as one of the most technologically interesting solutions to the problem of computer resource costs.

Forbes says that that we will see close to $300 billion spent on cloud services this year alone. It would seem that as more and more people come online from remote parts of the world, there will be a higher demand for inexpensive storage and back-up services. The long-term trajectory of all decentralized efforts in this category is probably, if executed correctly, nearly vertical.

P. H. Madore lives in Arkansas with his wife and children. He has covered the cryptocurrency beat over the course of hundreds of articles for Hacked's sister site, CryptoCoinsNews, as well as some of her competitors. He is a major contributing developer to the Woodcoin project, and is currently nearing the completion of a cryptocurrency exchange in concert with the firm he primarily works for, Vermont Secure Computing Consultancy.

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Cloud Storage: Mature Saturation or Early Adopter Phase? | Hacked ... - Hacked

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