Getting Personal

While the debate over Private Clouds v Public Clouds rumbles on, EMC Decho wants to introduce another factor: Personal Clouds.

“There is a looming crisis in information management,” says Charles Fitzgerald, vice president for product management at EMC Decho. “There are a few things happening that are driving the inflection point from the historical position of having a single PC or deviee to storing data in The Cloud.  We are all generating more data in the form of pictures and video and information. The world production of information is running at hundreds of exabytes a year, according to IDC. We also have the problem of having two decades of digital data across multiple machines that may have  a life span of around 3 years.

"Finally, data is becoming more valuable to us. If your pictures stored on a device get lost, then they've gone as no-one has copied them," he adds. “It's not a question of if bad things will happen, but when bad things will happen. Machines break or get stolen,  hard drives fail, back ups fail and so on. The more systematic people are the more likelihood there is of a domino effect. You see people load up back up tapes in a truck and send them off to a data centre hoping that the tapes won't fall out of the back of the truck!”

That's where Decho comes in. Decho – which stands for Digital Echo – was formed out of Mozy and PI, ttwo firms acquired by EMC.  Mozy provides online backup to 900,000 people and more than 25,000 businesses. PI is focused on developing online services for managing people's digital content, such as financial records, personal documents, family photos, and video scattered across different computers, digital devices and Web sites.

“We're really going after this information in a personal way,” explains Fitzgerald. “We think back-up is the best path to the future with a Personal Cloud.  We offer state of the art back up. Many localised back up applications have been developed for a decade or two. You have lots of users who are still on DSL so the upload speeds are slower than the downloads.  We address all of this. We have a really reliable and efficient back end.”

Getting Personal
 

The whole Personal Cloud concept remains a vision in part for the time being. “Really only about 1% of the market has been penetrated, “ reckons Fitzgerald. “But there's no reason why every device can't be backed up automatically to the Cloud. The Cloud world will start to refine and segment itself and one of the segments will be the Personal Cloud. This will be a repository for personal information that enables you to organise and access. It's inevitable that we will reach the point where we move our personal information away from a device and out into the Cloud.

“But as we look five years out, we need to be able to manage that Cloud. We have information scattered on a increasingly large number of sources. Facebook is now the biggest photo hosting service in the world, but they throw away the originals you upload. Having a Personal Cloud will allow you to keep the originals, but share them out.  The most important thing about the Personal Cloud is that it will be personal.  Fundamentally the data is your data and you need to be in control of it.”

Given that Decho is dealing with personal data, issues of data protection and data transfer rules must come in to play?  That is, after all, one of the reasons firms such as Salesforce.com invest in overseas data centres for local geographies. “For some reason, people don't want to have their data in the US where it's subject to the Patriot Act,” muses Fitzgerald, but suggests that Cloud firms are not keen to address data transfer concerns in any hurry. “Salesforce.com is just an Oracle database. Moving that to a replicated database is a non-trivial act. Companies will avoid that for as long as possible.  We have strong and rightous privacy policies. We don't sell your data. We don't sell your meta data. We don't target you with adverts. We align our interests with the interests of our customers. We have rigorous business adminstration policies.”