SugarSync is one of several companies competing these days to benefit from the disruptions in the market created by the new ways that people organize and share information from the any number of devices they use in their day.
That’s a fundamental shift that is happening as people move beyond the desktop as a place to keep their documents, their media and their productivity applications.
Services like SugarSync serve in many ways as personal clouds that people use for their own work. They seem like plain vanilla services but that as well is the benefit the services provide. They are very simple to use. Data is automatically backed up to the cloud.
SugarSync’s latest hosting numbers are revealing as they demonstrate how much data people are storing online.
SugarSync reports that in the past year, the amount of data added to the SugarSync data centers went from an average of 1 terabyte of data to 5 terabytes of information. In total, the company now hosts two petaybtes of information.
What’s fueling this growth? The customers may provide some clue. About 33 percent of customers are from outside the United States. Mobile devices are far more predominant outside the U.S. It makes sense that people would need an alternative place to store infromation besides their smart phone or netbook.
In light of the booming mobile device market, SugarSync, Dropbox and a host of other services are companies that seem like it would make most sense to develop mobile apps. That appears to be true. In the past 18 months, Sugar Sync has released apps for the Android, BlackBerry and iPad.
Services like SugarSync show how the data we create will become part of a personal cloud network. These services lay the grounwork for a new generation of personal and business offerings that work with users to create data as a service opportunities.
That’s down the road a bit but people do want so share. And they want to share outside the borders of a social network. Personal clouds could be a means to do that.
