Cloud Storage Services and Their Impact on Mobile Business

 Distributed cloud storage is one of the latest developments in the general landscape of cloud computing technology that has steadily encroached onto the business landscape during the last 12 years and particularly recently.

What Does Cloud Storage Mean: A Technology Overview

In essence, what cloud storage allows is for individuals and organizations to store and even share information in remote cloud networks located on the internet. This information can therefore be remotely accessed and used by distributed parties working from their own desktop machines, laptops, smart phones, tablets or any other devices connected to the web or at least the storage cloud itself. Information inside the cloud can also be updated and synchronized to fit changes made by remote users.

Typical cloud storage networks encompass a single central master server that handles computing and organization, with a number of storage servers connected to it. Just how many storage servers are used depends enormously on the size of the storage cloud. A massive public cloud storage system like Google’s “Drive” services for Gmail users and other buyers is immense while other, smaller private storage clouds that work off of intranets inside organizations or companies are going to be much smaller since they’re designed for just a small number of users.

In the case of public storage clouds like Google’s, multitenancy is an important design feature; this basically means that the clouds infrastructure is designed in such a way that allows it to support multiple tenants, each with their own digitally bricked off storage zones, each unable to intrude into others’ storage zones. Naturally, this is an important security feature of commercial and even multi-user private cloud storage systems.

General Benefits of Cloud Storage

The value and efficiency of cloud storage systems lie in three important factors: first, they’re remotely accessible, letting people that are scattered across large distances store information that others in their network can then access instantly and modify; second, they represent remote backup security, allowing vital information to be kept offsite and in much more secure remote servers that protect it from loss through computer theft, damage, fire or natural disaster; third, cloud storage networks normally work on an economy of scale in which a central provider, owning enormous amounts of storage server space, can rent out parts of it for much lower prices than if the various smaller users were to simply buy their own remote storage.

These are all recent advances that have occurred in cloud storage and they’re possible thanks in particular to the consistently improving accessibility that newer, more powerful broadband internet connections allow. Additionally, the spread of 3G, 4G and wireless networks is allowing more and more mobile devices to access and transfer data from storage clouds.

This is a completely logical tandem development; as large scale data storage becomes cheaper at the same time as data transmission becomes more robust, remote storage grows in accordance because of it’s obvious above-described benefits.

How The Storage Cloud is Making Business Mobile

By now the reasons why the cloud would make business more mobile should be logically obvious, but in more detail let’s go over some benefits of the centralized cloud as a decentralizing force in business mobility.

For one thing, since clouds allow companies to store and access information remotely, the need for a centralized information repository in an office that has to be visited for data acquisition is removed. Both employees and business owners can both distribute, modify, and redistribute information at will over their cloud network access points.

This lets many people work on important business projects from home instead of coming into work -telecommuting in other words. Since telecommuting is much cheaper than actually having to travel and show up in an office as a formal employee, the natural course that data and IT based companies are leaning more and more towards is one of either having their existing employees work and collaborate from home or simply hiring freelance contractors to begin with and saving even more money on salaries.

In either case, the result is ultimately the same; a company that would formerly have needed an office setting to house its employees can now either dramatically lower that offices size or get really radical and simply not exist as companies with any physical presence.

In part, one final result of this is the Micro multinational; a small company that can build itself an international presence with collaborators, employees, contractors and owners scattered all across the world, just as if the small company were a much bigger corporation. Cloud based storage is one of the main tools by which this can be achieved -along with other cloud based computing technologies and as well as communications and video conferencing applications.

The future of business both small and large is growing more mobile by the week, cloud storage is one its main tools and its presence will only grow further.

Guest Post provided by Steven Chalmers. When he isn’t reviewing Intercall’s web conferencing services, you can find him writing poignant articles about technology related topics or working on his vintage Mustang.