Cloud storage is always is the news. Sometimes it is due to new storage providers emerging, other times it is due to new features offered by existing providers and there was even an item about cloud storage providers winning legal battles over intellectual property ownership. However, there are other news items as well, some to due with security, others with changing financial markets and others still are full conspiracy theories. Let’s take a look at what some of this week’s most interesting cloud storage news tidbits have been.
Hard Drive Market in Europe Shrinks
Europe is still very hard hit by the global economic depression. Although the financial market is still volatile in our country as well, Europe seems to be harder hit than anybody. With countries such as Cyprus freezing resident’s bank accounts in order to pay for a bailout, countries like Iceland jailing bankers and countries like Greece being close to full bankruptcy, any market that offers employment shrinking is like a nail in a coffin. Yet, it seems that cloud storage is doing exactly that. Although most hard drive companies are Asian based, many of the manufacturing plants are actually in Europe, and many of the shops that sell these parts are in Europe as well. Hence, the fact that this market is shrinking rapidly in Europe could have quite disastrous consequences.
It might not be a crash, but the external hard drive market for consumers has gone into reverse in the past two years in the EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) region, according to new figures from the consultancy Futuresource. New data supplied to the Guardian shows that total capacity purchased dropped year-on-year for the first time – and it’s not clear that will recover as people buy more and more tablets which connect to cloud storage.
Change in the Business World
The world of business and commerce is changing not just because consumerism is changing with it. Clayton Christensen has been researching why large and successful corporations fail for over 20 years now.
While he expected to see firms who had simply lost their way, what he found were firms that followed all of the best practices taught at business schools like his, such as investing heavily in R&D, listening to customers and focusing on profits. In the 20 years since he began his research, it’s become clear that technology shifts can radically change time-honored business principles.
Cloud storage is one of these technology shifts. Technology moves at an exponential pace, which is known as the snowball effect. Corporations, however, still think on a linear basis. Furthermore, the advantages of scale, such as having a really large office, is far less important now because so much is done online. Also, business models change really quickly and corporations are struggling to keep up. Once upon a time, a single model would last for generations, whereas it has to be changed regularly now, just to be in line with modern requirements. Lastly, the balance of power has shifted tremendously. Once upon a time, a CEO was at the head of a company and their word was law. This isn’t the case anymore, because those at the front line actually guide how things go, as it should be. Some would even say that the lunatics now run the asylum and that cloud storage has a lot to do with this, as the “lunatics” can access any information they want.
Security Threats and Apple
Apple is at the heart of yet another controversy, this time because of their iCloud facility. It isn’t the first time that they have been in the news because of their security failings, which makes this second report so much more poignant. Some are suggesting – and conspiracy theories have a way of getting into popular culture this way – that Apple is purposely keeping their security as such a low level for a reason. Others, however, suggest that other providers are conspiring against Apple to knock them off the pedestal they have placed themselves on. It is certainly true that Apple controls a large part of the cloud market. However, this is also because anybody with an Apple device has access to the iCloud. According to Techpinions, however
Apple’s cloudy difficulties are becoming apparent through growing unhappiness among developers about the many flaws of Apple’s iCloud synchronization service. Ars Technica has a good survey of developer’s complaints about the challenges iCloud poses for developers. This long Tumblr post by Rich Siegel of Bare Bones Software is a deeper dive into some moderately technical detail.
The problem, it seems, is that the iCloud can’t integrate with apps that have not been designed specifically for Apple devices. However, this isn’t the big security issue that has now come to the forefront. The Verge has just had a big piece of breaking news, and the response from Apple has not been provided yet.
Last Friday, The Verge revealed the existence of a dead-simple URL-based hack that allowed anyone to reset your Apple ID password with just your email address and date of birth. Apple quickly shut down the site and closed the security hole before bringing it back online.
The big issue, it seems, is the iForgot system that Apple offers. This is where you go if you have forgotten your password details. All anybody needs is a few tiny details about a person, and they can access all of their Apple devices. This means they can get into the cloud and that they can do whatever they want to all the devices hooked up to that cloud account. Most people now have, at the very least, an iPhone and an iPad, which means that there could be quite serious issues with this problem. Not just that, people could have used their iCloud to store personal and private information that they would normally store on the hard drive of their PC or laptop. After all, that is exactly what the Cloud is for, supposedly, and that is exactly why Apple’s problems are so significant.
The post The Amazing Consequences Of Cloud Storage appeared first on Cloud Storage . us.