The Cloud Storage User Experience: Business & Consumer - What's the Difference?

The way ahead tells us that the lines between the business and the consumer experience are blurring.  We saw that, for example, in the Bechtel case study we blogged about. 

Bruce MacVarish tells us a good portion of this story, and his diagram is a good indicator of where we're headed. 

Add to this the voice of our friend Tim O'Reilly, who's been telling anyone who will listen that "it's time to start thinking of the phone as a first class device for accessing web services, not as a way of repurposing content or applications originally designed to be accessed on a keyboard and big screen." 

I can't agree with him more. 

So where are we today? 

What does the cloud user experience look like at this point in our journey?

The basic promise of cloud computing: instant access to your data anytime, anywhere, on any device, is already a reality:

Here are some of the must-haves as we see it for the end-user experience, be it business or consumer:

• Upload multiple files of any type: (documents, presentations, PDFs, Website images, videos, music and more) Files of any type and size can be uploaded, stored and instantly shared.
• Real-time access to stored files, with trusted service providers hosting your data.
• Collaborate and share files with anyone--inside and outside an organization. Users must be able to securely share files with vendors, customers, family and friends, all without having to have an account or moving files from their stored location. Control of  customer data is where it belongs - with the customer.
• Hierarchical and tag-based file organization: hierarchical and tag-based file system organization and storing with library file views for easy search and retrieval.
• Permission Management: Role-based permission management and share expiration lets you manage your private and public shared data.
• Notifications: Account holders and non-account holders get notifications when files/folders are shared or when they have been assigned to a collaborative project. Notifications of shares to non-account holders leverage a viral marketing element to invite recipients to get involved.
• Publish-able URLs: users must have the capability to generate public URL links to share and publish files on forums, blogs and websites (of course, they must also be able to share files securely, in private).
  
• End-to-end security: data must be secure both in transit and at rest.
  
• Data security and control: use 256 bit AES encryption for each stored file with SSL encryption for files in transit. That takes care of the basic security fears for business users and consumers. Why should one be less secure than the other?
• Online restoration of deleted files: Users should be able to delete and restore files right from the web.