Personal storage has emerged as a valuable service in a world where the digitization of private data has become critical. However current solutions face conflicting requirements between privacy, data backup, convenience and availability.
Operators striking the right balance between these can invest in new services generating additional revenues and most importantly make their packages stickier and more attractive.
There are now three principal categories of personal storage, DAS (Direct Attached Storage), NAS (Network Attached Storage) and Cloud storage. Originally DAS was the only option for most homes, providing a simple extension of existing storage, often as an attachable disk drive, giving individual users their own repository for content like photos or camcorded videos. It could attach to any device such as a PC, laptop or more recently a tablet via a USB or sometimes SATA connection and meant users could keep it wherever they liked.
But this portability could itself be a liability as the device could be lost, damaged or misappropriated. Then as people amassed ever more rich media content the limited capacity of DAS also became a constraint for a growing number of users. DAS also became much less attractive once you needed more than one storage device.
Then NAS entered the equation to solve the capacity conundrum and at the same time provide a more robust and resilient centralized storage system that could be shared by all users and devices in the home. Several RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) technologies could be implemented to protect against data loss or corruption as a result of individual disk failure. With NAS all devices can access the storage and, unlike DAS, smartphones can be attached via Wi-Fi. Being configured as a server, NAS supports multiple kind of technologies such as UPnP and DLNA protocols, SAMBA and others for sharing and streaming multimedia files to all home devices and can be configured to provide automatic storage back-up for FTP, email and web services.
But NAS systems can be relatively hard to configure, rather like home routers used to be. This has confined them to geeks and early adopters rather than mainstream home users, with another constraint being an often slow remote access outside the home as NAS systems are dependent of the service provider’s upstream bandwidth. A few NAS support remote cellular access but then the problem is lack of sufficient bandwidth for video streaming or uploading.
Both DAS and NAS devices have been heavily promoted by retail. Entrant OTT providers brought Cloud storage to this space to address the shortcomings of NAS.
Offerings like DropBox or Apple’s iCloud effectively have unlimited storage and can scale to almost any requirement. The Cloud takes away the burden of managing the storage centre while enabling access from almost any device anywhere. This remains subject to rights for recorded content that the user does not own.
The Cloud introduces two new problems of its own that NAS does not have. One of them is that physical security for the data is now in the hands of an OTT service provider. The second is loss of privacy, for even in the absence of a security breach the data may be accessed by the OTT service provider or in some cases by approved third parties. Users are confused and regulations are not clear on what it means to opt in or out.
Several high profile breaches have shown that these risks are. For example in October 2014 the usernames and passwords of 7 million Dropbox users were hacked. The Snowden affair also shows security and privacy issues in Cloud based services.
Combining NAS technology with Cloud storage is probably the next step of content storage. It provides the best of those two solutions to ensure accessibility, speed, security and privacy. Such solutions harness the strengths of each while eliminating their weaknesses. NAS can store personal content confined safely within the home for better security and privacy. If delivered by a service operator, NAS would no longer be confined to geeks. It could be part of a standard offer, be pre-configured on a managed network for more simplicity and be a unified experience across the different screens. The Cloud becomes an extension of private storage used for better data integrity, stored in two separate locations to deliver the promise of high capacity, content delivery quality, remote access and content sharing, at home and on the go.
Operators have understood the value of investing in this area. Swisscom, for example, deployed its first version of content storage and sharing on its Home Gateway that was connected to OTT Cloud storage in 2014. Orange, after having delivered a pure cloud storage to its end-users, has just announced the launch of its latest Home Gateway “La nouvelle Livebox” with a Hybrid Home Gateway / Cloud storage offering. Here, the Home Gateway plays the role of NAS, with 1To of storage, and is connected to Orange’s own Cloud storage service.
Broadcast and broadband operators have a role to play in the content storage business by differentiating from both NAS retailers and pure cloud service providers. By offering such a comprehensive, resilient and secure storage package, operators have a new weapon for resisting the GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon) invasion that threatens their dominant position in the digital home. This will create stickiness, strengthen the operator position in managing end-users data and generating higher ARPU.
