Who is the largest cloud customer? You.

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When it comes to the growth of the cloud, it’s personal.

I found these 2 stats from Seagate Market Research findings somewhat shocking:

• In the next 8 years, the cloud will account for >60% of the total capacity shipped.
• In the next 8 years, the % of total capacity shipped into the cloud will double.

What’s even more compelling is the location of such capacity. I would have thought that a majority of the capacity shipped (in terms of exabytes) would have shipped into the enterprise cloud data center.  In all actuality, Seagate’s findings show that that a majority (60%) will ship into what are commonly referred to as personal clouds.

What is a personal cloud?

According to PC Magazine, a personal cloud is “a small server in a home or small business network that can be accessed over the Internet. Designed for sharing photos and videos, personal clouds enable viewing and streaming from any Internet-connected personal computer and quite often from major smartphones. Although personal clouds function in a similar manner to any private cloud set up in a company, their primary feature is easy installation for the average personal computer user.”

Today, these personal clouds take shape in the form of network attach storage (NAS) with accompanying software or a web based GUI (graphical user interface) to manage the storage.  One example would be Seagate’s GoFlex Home, which I originally blogged about here. Personally (pun intended), I am in the process of centralizing all of my content on the my GoFlex Home device so my family can not only access them from any screen in my house, but also on each our our smartphones.

This raises a unique distinction for what a personal cloud really is.  I would argue that if you asked 10 people, “what is the cloud?”, a majority of them would believe it’s storage or services provided outside the home, when really, you can have a personal private cloud running wirelessly within the confines of your home. Many of us already do, and we may not even know it.

Don’t get me wrong, the cloud is also made up of enterprise data centers like Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Google, Yahoo, etc., online storage providers like Dropbox, and large companies like Seagate who also have their own private cloud.  So, when it comes to really defining what the cloud is, the answer is not so clear cut. We’ll tackle how Seagate defines the cloud in a future post.

Do you have a personal cloud? What’s your set up?

Related Posts:

So far, GoFlex Home exceeds my expectations

Seagate GoFlex – 2 terabytes of storage for my iPad?

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