Cloud Storage: Ready for Primetime?

Summary. At Structure 2011 one of the better panels I attended tackled cloud storage and what it will look like in the coming years. At one point in the panel the conversation centered in on the next generation of cloud storage being driven by applications written to take advantage of evolving architectures. However, the use of the term “Cloud storage” is a bit confusing in this conversation because we are really talking about different types of data management applications that exploit cloud. In these applications the storage is integral, yet practically invisible, to the experience. To help make my point, the example applications cited by the panel as “cloud storage” were Dropbox and Box.net. (note: I would add Evernote to the mix).