Connecting Tomorrow

There’s been much discussion about rumors of Google’s GDrive plans in recent days and it got us to thinking.  Wouldn’t it be easier if each individual user could have their own storage built into their home or business and have all of their applications online instead of on individual devices?  The software as a web service business model is brilliant and would be perfectly suited to take advantage of a setup such as this.  Instead of constantly installing the latest software on your PC and saving files to a remote location (for data integrity purposes), you’d do just the opposite.  You would use applications on the Internet that saved directly to your own personal GDrive right in your very own home enabling convergence with all of your home systems without having to cross the wire to retrieve the data.  No worries about data theft from a security breach on someone else’s servers.  Set your privacy and security concerns at ease as the data is stored in your home, under your own mattress!

There are obvious issues with a setup like this including firewalls and data backup, but those solutions can and should be pretty straightforward.  The GDrive could have a firewall built in (no backdoor of course).  Next issue.  Soon after your personal GDrive showed up, you could subscribe to an offsite disaster recovery service whose job it is to manage your backed up data.  Your GDrive burns its backup DVD on a weekly basis, tells you when it’s done, you drop your DVD into a secure drop box (think bank vault) down the street and is shipped off to another vault somewhere that nobody can ever access, except you of course.  Run into a problem?  House burns down, hardware failure?  No problem, get some new hardware (from an insurance check, sorry about the house) as well as the latest backup from the secure location and you’re back up and running without missing a beat.  Open up a new business model for the “Data Bank” while you’re at it.  Have a few branches in every town. 

Maybe banks can start handling all of your data as well as cash?  Hmmm…