Personal Cloud: Beyond Control and Convenience

In one of our previous posts we wondered if Apple’s iCloud was such a great solution for consumers. Despite our reservations we do regard the concept of the personal cloud itself as perfectly fitting in today’s world of social networking and mobility: always being able to access and share your information wherever you are. Clearly the benefits and downsides of the personal cloud differ greatly from the business cloud where benefits are all about lowering cost and creating flexibility and scalability.

For consumers these benefits do not exist since they do not have a large complex IT infrastructure. For consumers and individuals the financial benefits of third party personal clouds are zero or negative. In fact, if it is just storage you want, a 2TB USB harddisk costs less than 70 Euro including VAT. A quick look at some of the online storage providers shows the relatively high cost per Terabyte of storage. KPN charges 95,40 a year (excl. VAT) for 100G, Apple’s iCloud sets you back 80 Euro for 55 Gb per year and a service from ElephantDrive starts at $99,95 a year. In terms of cost, buying your own is the sensible thing to do; especially if you have a lot of videos and photos to store or share.
But there is a lot more to the personal cloud than just the cost aspect (see figure above). Ever since information technology went mobile, people want to access information anytime, anyplace, anyhow. This is an important driver for centralized online storage facilities. On top of that people own an increasing array of personal information devices. Having your books and music always at your disposal, or being able to check your agenda on any device is an important requirement for today’s netizen. Data synchronization is the next logical step and will make your digital life a lot easier. If you do own a digital collection of movies, music, and books that you cherish, creating a back-up is another sensible thing to do. Finally, this is the era of social networking and therefore the ability to share information has become an important requirement.

In the world of the connected consumer a personal cloud seems like a no brainer. But just like the business cloud the personal cloud comes in many flavors. There is a choice between vendors at the top of the food chain where companies such as ...

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