Is Personal Cloud As Disruptive As Personal Computer?

Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: Jonathan Feldman.

When I first read about Western Digital’s "personal cloud" for consumer storage, I didn’t think much of it. It was just a NAS with some clever apps that provided remote access features. But I’m now predicting that a more pervasive distribution of personally owned compute and storage assets will change the face of IT as we know it. Here’s why:

The Snowden effect

The revelations by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden about the extent of NSA spying on, well, everyone have led to public distrust of the government, the major providers of public cloud services, and even the basic security protocols of the Internet. If privacy-minded folks have an easy alternative to "protocols invented with the help of government agencies" or "software created by those we now distrust" — in the form of private clouds — they’ll take them…

Honey, I shrunk the NAS

Seagate’s new Kinetic architecture, whereby hard drives can be directly attached to Ethernet without a server, is a game changer. If it’s widely adopted, it will change the building blocks of networked storage by making each drive into a network node, so that file objects can be stored or retrieved based on a unique ID…

Read more from the source @ http://www.informationweek.com/is-personal-cloud-as-disruptive-as-personal-computer/d/d-id/1113260