Ten years after the birth of the cloud,
Box (News - Alert), Dropbox and other early cloud-based platforms are starting to reap the rewards of their efforts. Box just filed for its IPO and looks to take on the enterprise giants of the Fortune 500, while Dropbox (News - Alert) is basking in a $10 billion valuation.
While it may look like the glory days for the cloud, these early movers have likely peaked and may go the way of video stores and compact discs if they don’t evolve. They simply weren’t designed to handle the volumes of data that assault businesses today and, according to storage provider SanDisk (News 
- Alert), business data is growing faster than ever, doubling every 1.2 years.
A new abstraction layer is poised to reform the cloud space, bringing integration, workflow and intelligence to these legacy systems. After struggling to extract ROI from the first-generation cloud, users will see payoff from the next iteration—and it’s about time.
Image via Shutterstock
Hunting for Files, Folders and ROI
Cloud storage today doesn’t address the most fundamental need that users have: how to get the most out of existing information. The ability to stash content in folders and access it anywhere spurred initial adoption, but now users are scratching their heads as to how these systems provide real ROI. IT arm-wrestles with uploads and permissions, content drowns inside of systems not designed to scale, and teams must cross-navigate different repositories in order to find a single document.
As it turns out, cloud storage simply virtualized the overflowing file cabinet. Despite having access to several file systems at once, workers still can’t find anything. The typical user wastes up to 10 hours per week searching for information or reinventing content that is already stored somewhere else, according to research by IDC. Each document repository comes with a different user interface, a unique way of storing files and folders and different permissions—all of which amounts to time wasted...Read More
