There have been rumours for quite some time, but now Google has actually entered the competition of cloud storage services as well. Google Drive competes for users, who want to save their music collection, holiday photos or data in the cloud and share them with their friends, family or colleagues even on the road. 5 GB storage space in the cloud is for free and up to 1 TB can be purchased against payment of a fee (49,99 US$ per month).

The cloud as a hard drive for private users

Google is now entering the competition of cloud storage services with Drive as well

The cloud has been talked about as a huge topic for years now. The CEBIT 2012 was much influenced by the Cloud and Mobile. This topic is supported by the increasing spreading of smartphones and tablet PCs with private users. And ever since Apple has changed over from MobileMe to iCloud “a battle of the top dogs for private Cloud-users has been going on”, as news network n-tv strikingly phrased it. Thus, Microsoft reacted right away and restructured their service SkyDrive that has existed since 2008. Even the pioneer of all synchronization tools and cloud storages, DropBox, is going to extend their services this week and is now going to offer a new feature that allows the user to share data far easier via a link. In addition there are a lot of other service providers, who want a share of the pie: Amazon´s CloudDrive, Box.com, One.com, Rackspace or Telekom Cloud in Germany. All providers differ in a lot of points, but they have one thing in common. They offer storage space on a server on the internet. And the pie is big: According to IDC, the market for public cloud services is going to increase up to 72,9 billion US$ till 2015. (+27,6% YoY growth).

The goal of all these offers: To commit users to their services by offering free basic services and to make them paying clients by offering premium services later on. Because, if one settles for a particular service, they quickly get used to being able to have access to their data everywhere and at any time and they can´t get away from it that easily. A change of provider takes a lot of time. Everyone who has already tried to transfer all their music data from one system to another is not going to do it a second time any time soon. This business has a lot of potential due to the ever growing volume of data even in private areas: Someday almost every user gets to the charged area; and might leave the USB flash drive with all their holiday photos at home.  It remains exciting to wait and see how private users are going to react to this.