Google Drive Shakes Up Cloud Storage Market

It only took Google six or so years to get its long-anticipated GDrive cloud storage service out the door and into general circulation, but it finally did happen on 24 April.

What a relief. Now we can stop talking about the ‘planned’ cloud service and just call it “Google’s cloud storage service.” To its credit, the company has a good sense of humour about this incredibly protracted project, publishing a blog post entitled “Introducing Google Drive… yes, really” to break the news earlier today.

What GDrive Offers

Thumbing through the eWEEK archives, the earliest story we found was one published on 6 March, 2006, entitled “Google Continues Drive for Unlimited Storage,” which talks about the mysterious project that had been up and running internally for a while. That was so long ago the term “cloud computing” wasn’t even in common use way back then.

eWEEK has published dozens of stories by several writers touching on the promised Google cloud storage, but now we can discuss an actual, usable service.

Whatever took such a fast-moving company so long? We’re guessing that Google simply wanted to get it right.

For the record, a GDrive subscription offers the first 5GB of storage for free, which is not a heck of a lot these days. Users can upgrade whenever they want to 25GB for $2.49 (£1.55) a month, 100GB for $4.99 (£3.10) a month or even 1TB for $49.99 (£31) a month. When users upgrade to a paid account, their Gmail account storage also will expand to 25GB.

GDrive contains file-sharing and work collaboration tools, among many other features. Naturally, it is designed to work alongside a user’s overall Google+ account. For example, a user can attach photos from GDrive to posts in Google+; in the near future, the company said, they will be able to attach files from Drive directly to emails in Gmail.

GDrive is an open platform, meaning that it uses open standards for application development. Google says it’s in the process of working with third-party developers so users can soon have other functionality, such as sending faxes, editing videos and creating Website mockups directly from the storage service. To install these apps, users need to visit the Chrome Web Store.

Google has entered more than a few IT markets as a big-name latecomer — search, smartphone operating systems (Android) and social networking (Buzz network, G+) being but three of the most well-known. Its success record, nonetheless, has been very good.

Many Competitors Have a Big Head Start

There are already dozens, make that hundreds, of cloud-storage providers available to handle your files in a safe place, but the arrival of GDrive, despite its tardiness, caused quite a stir in the storage industry. Here are some industry

David Friend, Chairman and CEO of Carbonite, told eWEEK that “the launch of Google Drive is an excellent time for consumers to better understand the differences between backup, syncing, and cloud storage — all of which are valuable and serve different needs.”

While syncing services simply store data for personal use from a different location, you’re not fully protected unless you are using a backup service like Carbonite’s, which is specifically designed to back up computer files unobtrusively and automatically, Friend said.

“With syncing, if your computer crashes, there really is no automated restore process — it’s completely do-it-yourself-but, if there is a hard drive crash or computer failure and you have already installed a backup service, you can rest at ease knowing your files are protected from information loss,” Friend said.

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