In recent years the market for different cloud solutions have grown exponentially! In some industries it´s talked about like the only possible technology solution for the future. It is however interesting to see how the private consumer is acting or reacting to these technologies.

Keeping years of irreplaceable family photo´s on a cloud and not on a physical medium under your own control is something that I believe is challenging(And scary) for many people. Recently at the IFA fair in Berlin, Toshiba displayed a product that makes local copies from your android phone (It´s in their road map to expand it to Iphone as well) and saves these to a SSD hard drive. Naturally this can be done using a computer but this unit comes off as a defined loading station with the feature to backup your smart phone. So the appeal might be a bit more sexy for a ordinary consumer than what it would be for tech-geek.

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Smart phone backup device by Toshiba (Photograph by PCWorld.com)

The catalyst for such a product is the mistrust for internet storage services and a growing need to make “hard copies” by the consumers. For services like Dropbox or iCloud it´s is absolutely key to avoid bad publicity due to security breaches as this will fuel the alternative storage philosophizes. In that sense they are not only damaging their own brand but the technical solution as such and possibly spilling over to other cloud solutions. Vision based applications like for instance IP camers is another application that is using cloud technology and will be exposed if security cannot be guaranteed due to personal integrity. What is interesting is really how the market changes not only due to clever innovations but also the challenges that comes with them. I find it difficult to foresee which way it will go but exciting to follow.