Could online storage be the way of the future?

Almost 15 years ago, a small company called Juno provided free access to the Internet and email in exchange for displaying an ad bar while browsing the Internet. The storage space you got with the mail client was minimal by today’s standards, and even when you switched your paid service, you only got about 5 megabytes of storage space. Fast forward a few years; Microsoft and Yahoo are in the email game, competing with companies like AOL. Yahoo’s mail service begins offering a 100-megabyte email service, soon to match Microsoft’s Hotmail. Even later, Google enters the market, offering an unprecedented gigabyte of data, albeit only for users invited to beta testing its Gmail service. Now many email providers are in the gigabyte game, although Google is still one of the largest email service providers, offering more than 7 gigabytes of storage for the cost of a subscription. Of course, along with the mail storage offered by these providers, websites appeared that offer a similar service, albeit for data rather than mail. Sites like Rapidshare and Megaupload became hosts for data that consumers needed in storage, which they could then send to others to retrieve, or they could retrieve it themselves at a later date or to a different location.

With a push for faster data transfers and superior Internet providers will come an increased ability to store data online; not only in “cyberlockers” such as those listed above, but also through new services that will be able to provide data over the Internet in real time. Google already has services that work like this to some extent (Google Docs, for example), although these are small-scale examples. A larger-scale example of this could be storing a large program on an external private server that you could connect to and run from any computer. The potential uses for this are limitless, although the clear advantage would be the ability to produce and store programs larger than the average consumer-grade hard drive can reasonably hold. Of course, the problem of processing comes into play, but that could be remedied by using on-site processing to perform tasks and submitting encrypted data on the fly.

As the world tries to find the next “big thing” in storage, will we continue to develop personal physical media and simply increase the storage space of our internal / external hard drives and disk media, or will we move towards more digital solutions? The answer to this question will almost certainly be decided by the market, but either way, the future looks promising.

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