NAS | Tech Expectations

Bold statement? I was a bit surprised at the conclusion myself. But, let’s take a deeper look.

I’ve obviously made certain choices regarding storage, and have done my own comparisons at certain points in time, but was prompted to update my thoughts after a recent tweet by Chris Mims of the WSJ:

It's an accident of history that we think storing data on devices which others can physically access is safer than putting it in the cloud.

— Christopher Mims (@mims) May 14, 2014

Strong words from Chris, but they ring true. It’s easy to forget that your device can be stolen, and your typical protections (e.g. a lot of folks don’t even bother to set a device login) can be circumvented way more easily than a well-designed, well-funded cloud storage service. Historically, according to the Open Security Foundation, reported exposures of personally identifiable information (PII) resulting from lost or stolen devices and media made up more than 22% of all incidents, while hacking made up 30%. The numbers are comparable. While the percentage of incidents related to hacking has increased dramatically in the last year, the um, Target has been easier prey like retailers.

Looking more broadly than security, I wondered if a cloud storage service could actually be better than storage on a device.

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(updated 5/15/14)

Data storage is a massive market ($22.5 billion for the 2013 high end storage market alone), and has reached a critical point in its evolution, highlighted by dramatic changes in base technologies, interfaces, and service models. EMC’s recent acquisition of DSSD was another thought-provoking data point.

Hardware commoditization and component improvements have been a big part of the story. Magnetic storage has continued its relentless increase in density (Kryder’s Law), albeit with an extended pause in price declines due to a supply constraint from the Thai floods. Solid state storage is making significant inroads into enterprise and cloud data centers, pushing massive valuations for both enterprise flash vendors ($3 billion for Pure Storage), and flash-based cloud vendors ($153 million for Digital Ocean). Acceptance of x86 architectures for high scale storage systems, paired with open source hardware designs and scale-out software, has reached a pinnacle. Quanta Computer’s emergence as a direct system supplier and Red Hat’s acquisition of Ceph professional services firm Inktank are relevant data points there.

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Tech Expectations

A deeper look at disruptive business and personal technology

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