Could online storage be the way of the future?

Nearly 15 years ago, a small company called Juno provided free Internet access and email in exchange for displaying an advertisement 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 around 5 megabytes of storage space. Fast forward a few years; Microsoft and Yahoo are in the email game, competing with the likes of AOL. Yahoo’s mail service begins offering a 100-megabyte email service, soon to be matched by Microsoft’s Hotmail. Even later, Google enters the market, offering an unprecedented 1 gigabyte of data, albeit only to users invited to the beta test of its Gmail service. Now, many email providers are in the gigabyte game, though Google remains one of the largest email service providers, offering more than 7 gigabytes of storage for the cost of a signup. Of course, along with the mail storage offered by these providers came websites offering a similar service, albeit for data rather than mail. Sites like Rapidshare and Megaupload became hosts to the data that consumers needed to store, which they could then send to others for retrieval, or retrieve it themselves at a later date or to a different location.

With a push for faster data transfers and better internet providers will come a greater ability to store data online; not only in “cyberlockers” like those mentioned 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), though these are small-scale examples. A large-scale example of this might be the storage of a large program on a private external server that could be connected 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 processing issue comes into play, but that could be remedied by using on-site processing to perform tasks and send 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 surely be for the market to decide, but either way, the future looks bright.