Will cloud storage survive USB sticks?

The ability to back up information without having to charge a device is one of the benefits of cloud storage. However, connectivity gaps are some of the things that still work in favor of older technologies.

A little over 30 years ago, it was foolish to think that a whole collection of music albums could fit into a tiny device. At that time, the usual thing was to see floppy disks that could not even contain songs. They were used to store some files of Word.

The floppy disk era began to disappear in the late 1990s with the appearance of USB memory. However, in the beginning, its adoption was not as mbadive. The main buyers of these devices were companies wishing to store "large" amounts of information, which to date was about 32 megabytes. This today would be insufficient, it would serve to save the song five times Slowly.

"I remember the technicians who were walking with floppy boxes, when the USB drives arrived, they were fascinated," said Jean Pierre Cecillión, director of sales in South America of Kingston, one of the leading companies in this market.

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Later, and gradually, the USB key began to have more storage capacity and at a more affordable price. Your bang has been such that in cities like Bogotá It is common for informal pirate music sellers to promote it because they can easily store over a hundred songs.

As difficult as it may seem, at first, the leaders of Kingston they did not want to get into this business because for the date on which they felt comfortable offering great memories of the industry RAM for your artifacts. "Kingston employees started asking for USB sticks, asking for people, and finally they decided to do a test and that's how we started with these devices that helped to strengthen the recognition of our customers. brand worldwide, "said Carolina Maldonado, vice president of marketing and sales of this brand for the region.

What the managers did not know, when they refused to enter the portable and removable storage solutions sector, was that years later, not only mbadively produced USB drives, but also millions SD and micro SD cards. Now, it seems like this bang It finishes.

In dialogue with The spectator, Kingston executives said the USB stick market had stopped growing. Gabriel Pérez, director of the business unit of data center multicloud (cloud services) Cisco, states that "the adoption of cloud services on a global scale has grown steadily and rapidly".

Again, just like in the early days of USB, the cloud has found great customers in companies for its development. Perez says the impact has been such that companies are not happy with the use of a single service in the future. cloudbut they go to several suppliers. This is what is called multilayers.

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One of the advantages of the service, compared to the previous technology, lies in the fact that it is not necessary to transport a device from one side to the other, because everything is online, besides the practical aspect at the moment of creation. backups, useful for businesses, preserving the security of their files, as well as for the average citizen, by saving their WhatsAap conversations, for example thanks to a backup copy.

Will the USB drive disappear then? For Cecillión, the answer is no, at least in the next few years. The spokesman argued that the cloud storage service, while convenient, represents some obstacles in people's daily lives, such as the lack of ubiquitous Internet and transfer speeds. The fact that businesses and individuals can not be sure of having an Internet connection regardless of where they go, or that, if they have one, they have enough speed, there is always an attachment to USB memories.

Similar obstacles stand out in the video game industry, which has shown progress in supplying titles in the cloud. This is the case PlayStation Now and stadiums, the video game streaming service announced by Google. For Delio Molina, marketing manager of Solutions to Go, PlayStation, the reasons they continue to sell video games on CDs in countries such as Colombia are virtually two: low connection speed and lack of consumer banking.

However, the professional ensures that these obstacles are minimized in the future, to the point of reaching a hybrid system in which customers, in addition to considering the CD as something attractive, will start to subscribe to the services of games video via storage platforms. the cloud. "It's clear that the industry is evolving, with fiber optics and 5G networks, for example, providing better transfer speeds, but for convenience or privacy reasons, users still want to have the data with them. ", says Cecillión.

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For his part, Perez sees with uncertainty the future that could have a USB key. However, it is expected that in the coming years there will always be a mix between portable storage and cloud storage, while agreeing with Cecillión that improving connection speeds will make a difference that eventually leads to cloud to gain even more ground.

A company like Kingston sees cloud storage as an opportunity to continue to grow. Not because they're going to create a competitive service in this market, they do not actually believe that's their business, but because they'll be the storage providers of the different data centers, huge machine repositories that work 24 hours a day to enable service cloud. The bang cloud computing could bring good news to more traditional actors, an opportunity like the one presented in the late eighties.