A Brief History of Cloud Storage

Lata Tewari

3 years ago

Contrary to popular belief, the concept of Cloud Services and Storage has been around for a few decades now. Ever since the inception of the World Wide Web and related technologies, the blueprint for an interconnected global service network has aided us into creating the Cloud Technologies that we are aware of today. For anyone who is eager enough to know more about the aforementioned technologies, the following is a brief history of Cloud Services and Storage.

Cloud: An Ambitious Idea

The Cloud that we know today started as a mere concept which intrigued innovators and pioneers but unfortunately, couldn’t be acted upon given the severe lack of required resources and technical understanding. Although, the idea was never abandoned. Owing to the sheer potential of the idea, creators dedicated themselves to dedicating their brilliance towards developing the technologies to usher the concept into a reality.
The concept of Cloud Storage is believed to be the brainchild of Joseph C.R Licklider, an American computer scientist, and psychologist, as he contributed to creating ARPANET in the 1960s.
Ever since its inception, the cloud storage concept inspired several innovators to attempt and create the first few ancestors to today’s Cloud Storage services. None were able to succeed; that was until the year 1983.

A Step Towards a Dream

CompuServe, one of the first few commercial businesses built to provide online services, took the first step towards developing the cloud storage technologies that we know of today.
The company provided its users a relatively small amount of storage space which they could use to upload their files and documents. Storage devices were still advancing in this age. Therefore, CompuServe couldn’t utilize the technology to its true potential. However, it gave people a glimpse of the convenience that cloud storage could provide in the coming future.
In some sense. CompuServe aided the technological community in making their consumers look forward to a time when cloud storage would be more widely used.

The Inevitable Arrival

Next major contributor to the development of Cloud Storage technologies was AT&T who in 1994 launched and created PersonaLink Services – a platform designed specifically for business related communication.
A characteristic of PersonaLink Services that was crucial in the development of Cloud Storage technologies was the fact that their storage services were entirely based on the web.
AT&T were the contributor who pushed and defined the term “Cloud” that we know of today. They were also the inspiration for the cloud service titans that are reputed within the market today.

Taking Charge of the Future

The next advancement in the field of Cloud Storage took more than a decade to be commercialized. Amazon Web Services, in 2006, launched their AWS S3 which provided clients with reliable cloud storage technologies.
The deployment of AWS S3 aided various concepts to bring innovative products into the market. Pinterest, DropBox, and SmugMug utilized the services to create their products that we know of today.
Amazon Web Services was responsible for ushering a wave of innovative cloud-based products and inspired other technical giants to innovate in their wake.

The Present Day

Cloud Storage rapidly started gaining popularity and aided to develop several software and services that we use extensively today. In 2009, Google launched its program suite which included applications such as Google Sheets and Google Docs which allowed users to store their documents and access them from anywhere, at any time. After the concept of Cloud Storage was brought into reality, individuals created several other implementations for the same, one of the most prominent is Virtual Data Rooms – virtually created spaces mainly used to store crucial business-related documents.