Personal Clouds: We Really Have Come Full Circle
In early 2012 I wrote a blog entitled, Mainframe, Distributed, Personal, Cloud – Back to Where We Started? My hypothesis was how we have come full circle – mainframe back to “mainframe-like” in order to access the applications we somehow cannot live without. Except now these apps reside in a “cloud” somewhere in a massive server farm instead of on-premise and they’re at our beck and call anytime, anywhere. The the obvious benefit to the cloud is, well, obvious: your data is off-premise, sitting on someone else’s iron somewhere, but is accessible using standard IP protocols and is easily, instantly accessible.
Recently, I noticed an interesting twist on this whole thing. I saw a commercial a few nights ago about the advantages of having your own PERSONAL cloud. Hmmm, imagine this: having a piece of hardware which enables you to have your own personal information with you where no one else can access it. Is it me, or does this sound like a faster personal computing device with more storage than we have on-premise?
Here is one vendor announcement.
New Transporter Sync Delivers the Convenience of Dropbox for All Your Data, With Total Privacy And No Monthly Fees
What makes Transporter, old and new, stand out is an emphasis on privacy, a word that’s become all the rage in an increasingly wary consumer market. All of your data is saved locally, and by circumventing the need for a public cloud, the company claims that your precious files are as safe as houses.
Pretty cool stuff! Don’t get me wrong, I’m not quick to decide which is better between Containers vs. VM for storage and sync. The technology is truly amazing and I admit it’s tough to get through the day without it. I’m beginning to think my January 2012 blog post was pretty accurate. We are now moving into the brave new world of personal computing — this time, with privatized cloud storage that bears an eerie resemblance to the storage systems we saw back in the PC’s heyday — just without the always-on, constant-access features. Giant, private hard drives — in the cloud, this time.
Revolution can look an awful lot like iteration.
