Create Your Personal Cloud

Using a combination of smartphones and tablet technologies, media servers and notebook computers, customers are today able to access their devices across multiple locations from multiple computers.

Customers create their own personal cloud by storing all their data on computing devices in multiple locations. Personal data including photos and videos would be stored on a media server device in the home. Professional information might reside on a media server in the office. They then bind all this content together into a seamless cloud by creating an account that enables them to access that information remotely, using personal mobile devices.

The cloud that the customers create for themselves is then easy to access by clicking an app in the smartphone or tablet to access their home media sever. This enables them to enjoy their content everywhere and share media including videos, photos, and music to their social network with the touch of a button (or the swipe of a fingertip).

The Possibilities

Building a personal cloud in this way creates some remarkable possibilities. Today, freelance designers may window-shop along Fifth Avenue, taking pictures with their smartphones. They can store these pictures on their media server device at home.

When the freelancers fly to another city to visit a client, they take their tablet computer along. In the client' s office, the freelancers use the tablet to access their desktop computer at home, logging into the personal cloud account that they created to search through their artwork.

The client then wants to know more about their other works, so the freelancers access another portfolio, residing on the media server at their office. To the freelancers and their clients, it doesn' t matter where the data resides; the personal cloud that they have crafted now takes care of it.

That same freelancer might be unwilling to store his photos on an internet based cloud storage service, which can be expensive. Many of them limit users to 5 GB of storage or less, and yet most people have at least 500 GB of storage on their computers.

Storing files on a personal cloud is far more secure than putting them on the internet. Cloud service providers can store a customer' s data anywhere, in any country, and the customer will not be aware of its location, or the security measures taken to protect it. When stored at home, your files are under your control. You control the equipment that stores your files, along with the username and password details that protects it. You control the encryption of your personal data, and no third party can access it.

Why store a tiny subset of your information insecurely online, when you can create a personal cloud, storing it on media server storage in the home? You can then use your personal mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablet computers, for fast, multi-location access.

With a personal cloud of your own creation, you can then share these files using social networking services such as Facebook, via your mobile device. Later on, while the freelancer has lunch at a coffee shop, he remembers that he wanted to show several pictures to friends on Facebook. He can access his network attached storage to find those pictures and upload them.

With a media server so effective and convenient, it makes sense to create personal clouds, where your data is close at hand, even when it is on the other side of the country.

This is the world of the personal cloud. Don' t you want to be a part of it?

RISHI SAMADHIA

The author is vice president,

ZyXEL Technology India

maildqindia@cybermedia.co.in