Smartphones To Drive Cloud Growth: Study

An increasing adoption of smartphones and tablets will accelerate the adoption of cloud computing globally, says a recent research by Gartner Inc. Consumers are expected to store more than a third of their digital content on the cloud by 2016, up from the existing 7 percent in 2011 to 36 percent in 2016.

Majority of the new age devices are equipped with features like camera and recorder, hence the possibility of capturing video, photos and audio files has gone up tremendously. Further, the new age social media collaboration tools like Facebook and Twitter Inc. have increased the opportunity to share these files in the personal space.

Worldwide, consumer digital storage needs are expected to grow from 329 exabytes in 2011 to 4.1 zettabytes in 2016, says the report. This includes digital content stored on PCs, smartphones, tablets, hard-disk drives (HDDs), network attached storage (NAS) and cloud repositories.

This growth will improve the market prospects for application developers and online storage and sync companies. While the majority of growth is expected to come from North America and Western Europe, In Asia-Pacific, Japan and South Korea will lead the growth.

In India, cloud adoption, despite seeing a considerable growth, is still in its early days, and according to experts, it will take at least 4-6 years to build the momentum. While the uptake is certainly high amongst young people, poor connectivity, expensive plans from online backup companies and expensive Internet plans have restricted the growth to urban regions only.

"Cloud storage will grow with the emergence of the personal cloud, which in turn will simplify the direct-to-cloud model, allowing users to directly store user-generated content on the cloud. As storage becomes part of the personal cloud, it will get further commoditized. Therefore, online storage and sync companies need to have a strategic rethink about their future approach, comments Shalini Verma, principal research analyst at Gartner.

It is expected that consumers will first try the basic package offered free by online backup companies. These services, according to Gartner, will be offered as apps on tablets, smartphones and broadband-connected TV because of partnerships between original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and online storage and sync companies.

Jatinder Singh, Principal Correspondent, Light Reading India