A year ago, data privacy may not have meant much to you unless you were a big business or a government entity. Chances are today your interest is already piqued at the idea of protecting your basic information from corporations who store your personal data online. If it is, you would be joining a growing faction of internet users who are starting to make protecting themselves online a priority.
Data privacy, or information privacy as you may know it, is a growing global concern for small businesses and individuals just as much as it is for large corporations. Fines for violations of data privacy regulations are expected to reach $150B USD in 2017. And Yahoo!’s announcement about a 2013 privacy breach that affected one billion customer email accounts is certainly cause for the average Joe to question whether trusting corporations with their information in a “dangerous and broken cyberspace” is good enough.
Data breaches are becoming more and more common amongst companies with hundreds of millions or sometimes billions of customers affected. People are now taking the protection of their data into their own hands instead of relying on companies that don’t seem to be committed to protecting them.
Mothered from what may now be considered a necessity, personal clouds are providing a way for individuals to store their own information. The technology, which is also called Network Attached Storage (NAS), might just be the wave of the future. These devices, which can be plugged into home internet routers, give users the same experience they are used to from major cloud providers like Google, Dropbox, and Apple. Except in this case: no corporation is mining your data.
Severin Marcombes, CEO of Lima Technology, a company in the middle of the personal cloud industry, opened up about the future of the personal cloud and what it means for private consumers to be able to use technology previously only marketed to big businesses.
Q: Data privacy can seem like a really abstract thing, one of those problems that only matters when something bad actually happens. Do you see consumers starting to take privacy more seriously?
Marcombes: Data privacy can be a very abstract issue for consumers, and that is largely the fault of the large companies that created the infrastructures we all use online. Whoever created the “Cloud” concept was a marketing genius. It is branded to sound so much different than it actually is and not to connote ideas about data mining, identity theft, or the numerous other things that can and do happen. But consumers are waking up to these issues. At Lima we understand that consumers will make the shift to data secure solutions if and only if the new system is as easy as the current one. So we made sure our technology was foolproof and easy to use.
Q: Many people who are concerned about privacy do not think they are technologically proficient enough to set up their own cloud system. Is Network Attached Storage (NAS) user friendly?
Marcombes: That is understandable, creating your own cloud (or NAS) system sounds daunting, particularly for consumers who are not tech-savvy. And until recently, these devices were challenging to manage, even those that were designed to be consumer facing. The old systems required using multiple apps, clunky interfaces, and so on. But today the technology is incredibly simple for consumers to use.
Q: This technology is not new, but it is getting really good now, with speeds that compete with the big cloud storage providers. Are the big cloud providers talking about NAS?
Marcombes: Not really, or at least not yet. Big cloud companies need the data because that is where their profit comes from. But as NAS becomes more prevalent and cuts into their revenue streams, they may find a way to fire back. Competition is a good thing, it will drive all of us to improve and customers win.
Q: NAS technology is being produced by a lot of different companies now, the variety can be overwhelming if you do not know what to look for. How does the Lima Project, for example, compare to what is on the market?
Marcombes: For starters, Lima is not really a traditional NAS. What sets us apart is that users can access their files whether they are connected to the network or not. So much like you can work on your files on Dropbox or listen to your Spotify music even when you are on a plane without an internet connection, Lima gives users access to their files at all times. But in addition, the technology is plug and play in terms of usability. It automatically configures the network to allow for access across devices. Its user interface is like modern applications that consumers are used to, not like clunky router settings. These elements are what make Lima’s technology the leader on the market.
Q: Where does this technology go from here? What will happen in the next 5 years?
Marcombes: Hard to say. Here are a few trends:
- Microsoft is really betting that data will be in the Cloud (they hope it will be OneDrive). Windows 10 internals are designed to work with remote data. This is a very good thing for Lima because we can leverage those APIs for good OS integration.
- Applications are going away, replaced by cloud services (e.g. Office 360). It is a problem that with those applications the maker of the application chooses where you can store the data, not you. It can be on their servers, or sometimes on clouds they integrate with (e.g. "save in Dropbox / Google Drive"). We need a generic protocol for something like that, like "save in my cloud", that everyone (including private clouds like Lima) can implement. Hopefully this will happen because CIOs at large companies won't accept that they have to lose control of their data (security, backups, etc) to use this software.
- Depending on how mobile hardware evolves, some mobile applications themselves may move to the Cloud, because they become heavier and heavier and mobile storage does not expand fast enough.