Although the cloud is an ethereal concept as such, its evolution would not have been possible without the advancement of computers with greater processing capacity or data centers to support the large amount of information stored in the digital world.
Logically, the reference is to the cloud that is part of the Internet, a space in which –almost– all the data is storedfrom some more sensitive such as banking to others such as information from websites.
As a result of its development and the expansion of its capabilities, online services such as Dropbox or Google Drive were born, among others that have evolved to face new challenges.
Interestingly, the first reference to this concept would arise from a letter written by Joseph Carl Robnett Lickliderone of the most relevant figures in computer science during the 1960s.
That was the first seed planted, although the real development would come in the early years of the 21st century, with the birth of Web 2.0, which offered faster file transfer speeds, the most important point of cloud storage systems. .
Thanks to this, very varied companies focused on these services began to be born, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), iCloud, Google Drive, Dropbox, or OneDriveamong other.
During the last 25 years, the Internet has become an essential part of many people’s lives, far from its original concept of sharing information between researchers with a network of computers connected to each other.
Thanks to the launch of new products such as the iPhone or the creation of specialized applications to store data in the cloud, the Internet has led many consumers to rely on it to store and share their files.
All this has been possible thanks to the advent of Web 2.0a term coined between 2004 and 2005 by Tim O’Reilly, owner of the O’Reilly Media publishing house, and who theorized about new participatory platforms and applications, instead of the rigid web of 1.0.
With this in mind, Megaupload was born on March 21, 2005probably one of the most famous cloud storage sites due to the media coverage of the arrest of 2 of its co-founders in New Zealand.
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His success, as the FBI shared at the time, was overwhelming: controlled 4% of total Internet traffic, had more than 1 billion visitsmore than 150 million registered users and 50 million daily visitors.
It offered a large amount of storage capacity and had the important support of artists and musicians such as Will.i.am or Alicia Keys. But it also hosted third-party pages, such as Cuevana or SeriesYonkis, famous for their access to content protected by copyright.
This fact condemned Megaupload, which the Department of Justice of the United States pointed out as “one of the largest criminal copyright cases that have been tried by the United States.”
In addition to copyright infringements, whose damages were estimated at 500 million dollars by the Department of Justice, was added the confiscation of 18 domains of the company, based in Hong Kong.
At that time, the Anonymous hacker group launched a coordinated cyberattack against the Department of Justice website and also brought down the SGAE page in Spain, in a complaint against the arrest of the co-founders.
Megaupload shut down for good on January 19, 2012.
Something similar happened with the first service of this type, RapidShare, which was born in 2002 to offer the same thing as Megaupload. Like this one, it had to fight against copyright associations and ended up closing in 2015, also due to high competition.
Beyond this turbulent birth on infringements of intellectual property and copyright, cloud storage continued to add success after success with the arrival of Google Drive or Dropbox, which attacked at exactly the right time.
The arrival of the ‘big tech’
After the great success of cloud storage has been demonstrated, big tech took advantage of the situation and entered fully into this growing market.
Although before these had arrived Dropboxa service that was born in 2007 to offer an alternative to users who still used email to share files of all kinds.
However, the company has not been without controversy either, since Edward Snowden assured Guardian that it was very “hostile” regarding privacy, having Condoleezza Rice on its board of directors and aspiring to be a partner in an electronic surveillance program.
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Rice had previously been Secretary of State during the George Bush administration and this set off alarm bells, despite the fact that many private companies have politicians from one side or the other on their boards of directors, such as former president Al Gore at Apple.
Parallel to the birth of Dropbox, one of the great technology companies, Amazon, ventured into the world of cloud storage, but with a somewhat different service, and without focusing on end users.
In 2006, Amazon Web Services was created, dedicated to offering services to other websites or applicationswith important clients such as Glovo, Pinterest, Goldman Sachs, Netflix or Epic Games, among many others.
These days, if Amazon Web Services goes down unexpectedly, customer pages often go down with it. But Amazon wouldn’t be the only one. bigtech that would enter this market, since Microsoft had developed its own “virtual hard drive”.
Although it was not called Microsoft OneDrive until 2014, this service had been available for 7 years under the name of SkyDrive, with an incredible storage for the time of 25 GB.
Again, with controversies regarding the privacy of the service, because they are part of the spy network PRISM, of the National Security Agency (NSA) of the United States, with which the Government can have access to the stored content .
For his part, Google launched Drive, whose service was born from the famous Google Docs and, in 2012, he changed his domain name from docs.google.com to drive.google.com. With its arrival, the company increased the storage for Gmail up to 10 GB.
A space that has been increased to 15 GB in a unified way for all Google applications.
Although all these services have been some of the most important, it should be noted that they are not alone, since among the competition you can find very relevant examples such as Apple’s iCloud.