Your Cloud Storage Needs Are About To Dramatically Increase

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I have a collection of old microcomputers at home, mostly from the 1980s. Some of them have ridiculously small amounts of memory available — such as my Sinclair ZX81 with 1KB of RAM. To put that in context, a single photo uploaded to Instagram today might be around 5,000 times bigger than the entire memory of this old computer.

We take storage on IT systems for granted now. Saving space used to be an important task for all software development teams. The famous millennium bug problem was caused by programmers storing years using two digits ’98’ or ’76’ for example. They assumed the year would always be ’19’ plus two digits – it didn’t work in the year 2000.

Cloud computing now helps companies access all the storage they need and allows them to flex up and down as required. Individual consumers experience this as well through the use of tools like Google Drive, the Apple iCloud, and DropBox. Storage feels unlimited.

It is a challenge for CIOs to estimate how much storage they will need because it is now so hard to estimate a ‘steady state’ for their business. Something always comes along that demands the use of more and more storage space. Digital twins are a great example in the business environment — suddenly every physical entity (engine, office, factory) starts using sensors so a virtual model can be created.

One look at our personal use of data gives an easy to understand example of how this increase in storage happens. I have very few photos from when I was a child. My parents had some books full of prints, but it cannot be more than a few hundred photos documenting my entire childhood at most.

My daughter has photos stored in a private cloud from every single day of her life. The exact number varies, but today is just a regular school-day – no vacation or special events. I still have 12 new photos of her from today on my phone. There are probably over 15,000 photos of her stored in my iCloud.

This can create problems for kids. Parents that share all this data publicly create a searchable mine of information about their children – usually without the permission of the child. But the main issue I am thinking about here is the storage – suddenly every parent is taking 20 photos a day of their child rather than 20 photos a year.

This question around storage is about to get exponentially more complex as people start recording every aspect of their life – rather than just their heartbeat, steps, and a few photos.

Silicon Valley investors are now funding ‘lifecording’ companies that are exploring how to record everything we see and hear all day. Solutions are emerging that record everything you hear, constant timed photos from your life, video of key moments, a complete location history, and even the ability to capture and recreate smells. Everything is recorded.

The discussion is around how it will soon be entirely normal to passively record everything in your life. Allowing you to rewind and see video from Christmas five years ago or to remember everything you said in a business meeting yesterday.

It sounds like science fiction, but this is what investors are exploring for a new generation of wearable devices.

The bottom line is that whatever storage you think might now be normal for all your photo and video needs, it will be seen as a trivial amount of storage within a few years.

This has obvious implications for people in their personal life. They need more storage, but they also need to start thinking about personal security in a much more detailed and structured way. Imagine the effect of losing all this personal data.

For CIOs the headaches are bigger. Companies recording and accessing more and more data not only need greater storage, they need better ways to access and review the information. Edge computing and other cloud strategies become essential – some data can be stored away and accessed infrequently, but some will need to be quickly available. Hybrid clouds will need to be designed.

AI will be a valuable tool for searching and summarizing all this data, but it can also be critical for protecting it and ensuring that only approved users can access the stream from personal devices or sensors being used within a digital twin.

An iPhone today comes with up to 1TB of storage. What feels huge today may soon feel like that old ZX81. How did they ever get 3D Monster Maze to work on such a basic system?

IBA Group has an experienced practice focused on data management, data analytics, and AI. Check the website here for case studies and examples of projects that have been designed and delivered in addition to ideas, insights, and project suggestions.

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