Why Canadian businesses are turning to cloud-based data storage

Rogers Communcations SVP Charlie Wade talks about the climbing cost of storing your own data—and why borders still matter

Small to mid-sized businesses across Canada are faced with a problem—they’re collecting more data than ever before, and they need somewhere to store it. While many have their own in-house servers to do the job, these can require frequent maintenance, and, consequently, plenty of cash. To cut down on those costs, companies are increasingly turning to cloud-based data storage. Amazon Web Services was a pioneer in such low-cost data warehousing and remains one of the biggest providers, but for a variety of reasons—whether because companies want additional technical support or because regulations require them to store their data within Canada’s borders—many are looking around for other options. Rogers Communications (which owns Canadian Business) unveiled a new one today— the Rogers Public Cloud. We asked the company’s SVP of products and solutions, Charlie Wade, what Canadian companies are looking for from their cloud-computing providers now:

Personal cloud market set to reach $90 bn by 2020

The global personal cloud market is estimated to have revenues of $89.9 billion by 2020, according to new research.

The report by Allied Market Research, titled World Personal Cloud Market - Opportunities and Forecasts, 2014-2020, said that the market would increase by 33.1 per cent between 2015 and 2020. It said that growing customer awareness is expected to boost the growth of the personal cloud services in future.

Microsoft is breaking its cloud-first promise

Microsoft kicked off its own "productivity war" in June last year by doubling its free OneDrive storage and offering competitive pricing and 1TB of space for Office 365 subscribers. That storage, part of a monthly or annual subscription, then transformed into unlimited space late last year as Microsoft aggressively targeted Dropbox and Google to win over consumers and their storage needs. It all won Microsoft lots of new OneDrive customers and a lot of praise. Now that the bait and switch plan has worked, Microsoft is changing the rules of the game.

Technology companies usually pick Apple events to silently drop bad news, but if there's not one available then as late in the day as possible is always a good alternative. Microsoft chose 10PM ET last night to drop some big news, in a blog post, about the future of its OneDrive cloud storage service. Starting early next year, all new and existing free OneDrive storage will decrease from 15GB to 5GB. Microsoft is also removing the 15GB camera roll storage bonus for using OneDrive on iOS, Android, or Windows Phone. If you need to store more than 5GB then you'll need to start paying.

It's clear Microsoft has miscalculated how much space OneDrive needs on average, and it's likely that the company isn't making its targets for switching users over to paid subscribers. Pushing the limits down will help. "These changes are needed to ensure that we can continue to deliver a collaborative, connected, and intelligent service," says Microsoft. The reality is more that Microsoft needs to start generating revenue from its consumer cloud activities and stop giving away thousands of GBs of storage. It was good to entice people in, but now it's time to pay. Microsoft really wants consumers to just opt for Office 365 subscriptions with OneDrive storage and Office software.

Read more : http://www.theverge.com/2015/11/3/9663878/microsoft-onedrive-free-storage-changes-cloud-first

Object storage: Cloud vs in-house

Object storage has attracted a lot of attention in recent years. Indeed, it has become the foundation data storage layer for much of the cloud and for many of the very popular services that have evolved there, from Facebook to Dropbox and pretty much everything in between.

However, it has also introduced – unnecessarily and dangerously, some would argue – an extra layer of complexity into storage planning. Its formal definition – that it is a storage architecture which manages data as objects, rather than managing it as either files or blocks – has left many people confused and wary.


In many ways, it could have been more productive and less confusing all round had the IT industry called the new concept an “enhanced file system”, or something along those lines. After all, what is an object but a song, a photo or perhaps a database? And weren't those merely files before, so why all the extra complexity?

The answer lies in the object metadata – the additional information that tells you useful things about the data. So while there is still in most cases a one-to-one mapping between objects and files, with each object also being a file, that isn't always true. More importantly, an object is not just a file, and it can be much much more than that.

Read More : http://www.computerweekly.com/feature/Object-storage-Cloud-vs-in-house