IHS iSuppli has released a research report on cloud storage providers. The cloud has been a hype word for a couple or years already but seems to have made its breakthrough this year. While services such as Dropbox, Mozy and Carbonite are widely known due to their offering of limited amounts of free space, the major players are Apple, Google and Microsoft. Their offerings are usually deeply integrated in other products and they have the huge user base. The big and small players together are good for an estimated total of 500 million subscribers which will likely grow to a whopping 1,3 billion subscribers by 2017.
While these numbers clearly show a growing market, it isn't all that profitable according to IHS iSuppli. While not making money, the cloud is still an important part of the strategy for many technology companies, as it could be a reason for consumers to stay with them. Once they have a large amount of files stored on the cloud, they likely don't want to go through all the hassle of moving their files to other cloud services, making the cloud a customer loyalty tool.
Still there are concerns for using the cloud, as we recently reported how someone lost a lot by uploading files to Microsoft Skydrive. We'd recommend to never rely on cloud storage alone, but also make local backups.
