Telecom Lead Asia: Rapid adoption of connected devices
and desire to share content will encourage consumers to start storing a third
of their digital content in the cloud by 2016.
The worldwide consumer digital storage needs will grow
from 329 exabytes in 2011 to 4.1 zettabytes in 2016, according to Gartner.
In 2011, just 7 percent of consumer content was stored in
the cloud, but this will grow to 36 percent in 2016.
The market research firm says that increased adoption of
camera-equipped smartphones and tablets is allowing users to capture huge
amounts of photos and videos, thus creating storage needs.
This includes digital content stored in PCs, smartphones,
tablets, hard-disk drives (HDDs), network attached storage (NAS) and cloud
repositories.
“With the emergence of the personal cloud,
this fast-growing consumer digital content will quickly get disaggregated from
connected devices,” said Shalini Verma, principal research analyst at Gartner.
However, the firm notes that most of the cloud
storage needs of consumers will be met by social media sites such as Facebook
and Google that offer free storage space for uploading photos and videos for
social sharing.
Average storage per household will grow from 464
gigabytes in 2011 to 3.3 terabytes in 2016.
In 2012, the adoption of camera-equipped tablets
and smartphones will drive consumer storage needs. Gatner predicts that
Cloud service providers (CSPs) will also increasingly offer cloud storage.
Region wise, Asia/Pacific, Japan and South Korea will
witness the highest growth in cloud storage, where CSPs have been offering
online storage and sync services for some years.
