
THE YEAR IN REVIEW
It has been some year in the world of Cloud and Cloud Storage in particular. We witnessed the demise of Nirvanix, as well as the revelations of Edward Snowdon outlining the surveillance of the PRISM surveillance program and the alleged collusion with major US Service providers
Amidst all of this the behemouth that is Amazon continued to move forwards apace and continuing to add new services and reduce pricing.
There has been space in the market for new vendors such as Dump Truck, which launched almost exactly 1 year ago, and Copy, both of which predominantly offer services aimed at the consumer market. Many new Enterprise cloud storage services were launched in 2013 such as Verizon, EMC, Colt Telecom, Lenovo showing that vendors anticipate a huge enterprise demand for cloud related services from their incumbent customers.
The OpenStack open source cloud platform continued to go from strength to strength with vendors, such as RedHat offering new OpenStack related products and aiming for OpenStack dominance.
Meanwhile Amazon S3 continued to be the de facto storage API for developers and storage product compatibility, something we predicted over 3 years ago when we added the S3 API to the SME platform.
Another interesting recent development in 2013 was SugarSync announcing plans to stop offering free accounts and close all existing ones. A pretty big step that upset a lot of (free) customers.
CLOUD STORAGE PREDICTIONS FOR 2014
1. Following on the from the round-up of 2013 above and the latter entry on SugarSync, it is likely we will see other services shutting down their free storage offerings. The key lesson here is that free is not free for ever it seems.
2. Expect to see a DropBox and Box IPO in 2014.
3. Due to the PRISM and NSA debacle we expect to see more non US companies wanting to stop their data from being hosted in the US.
4. Security has become the number one concern for companies when dealing with data. Expect more file sharing vendors to follow SME’s lead and try and retrofit logging / auditing / enhanced security in their product offerings.
5. Expect more companies to want remote data to be encrypted with keys they control. This will become part of a companies security playbook for 2014. (see our prior blog post for how SME does this).
6. 2014 will see companies want more from their Storage solutions – how do they solve their businesses problems, how do they fit in with corporate governance and help implement common policies ?
7. Big Data will continue to dominate hype cycles for storage vendors and expect to see a slew of new products.
In the meantime all that is left to wish you all a Happy New Year !




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