Just as we have seen a number of gateways to allow you to access public cloud storage in a more familiar way and making it appear as local to your servers, we are beginning to see services and products which do the opposite.
To say that these turn your storage into cloud storage is probably a bit of a stretch but what they do is to allow your storage to be accessed by a multitude of devices where-ever they happen to be. They bring the convenience of Dropbox but with a more comfortable feeling of security because the data is stored on your storage. Whether this is actually any more secure will be entirely down to your own security and access policies.
I’ve already blogged about Teamdrive and I’ll be blogging about it again and also the Storage Connector from Oxygen Cloud in the near future. I must say that some of the ideas and the support for Enterprise storage by the folks at Oxygen Cloud looks very interesting.
I do wonder when or if we’ll see Dropbox offer something similar themselves, Dropbox with it’s growing software ecosphere would be very attractive with the ability to self-host. It would possibly give some of the larger storage vendors something to consider.
These new products do bring some interesting challenges which will need to be addressed; you can bet that your users will start to install these on their PCs, both at work and at home. The boundaries between corporate data and personal data will become ever blurred; much as I hate it, the issue of rights management is going to become more important. Forget the issue of USB drives being lost, you could well find that entire corporate shares are exposed.
But your data any time, any place is going to become more and more important; convenience is going to trump security again and again. I am becoming more and more reliant on cloudy storage in my life but for me it is a knowing transition; I suspect for many others, they are simply not aware of what they are doing.
This is not a reason to simply stop them but a reason to look at offering the services to them but also to educate. The offerings are coming thick and fast, the options are getting more diverse and interesting. The transition to storage infrastructure as software has really opened things up. Smaller players can start to make an impact, let’s hope that the elephants can dance.