Thursday, 21 July 2011

And what about the filestore ?

The odd thing about this synced everywhere world is that no one is talking about the role of company or institutional filestore.

Which is kind of interesting. One of the remaining justifications for maintaining a central corporate filestore is control of intellectual property. The other big one is ensuring data integrity.

Of course people don't save things logically to the central store anyway - disk space on their laptop is such as to be effectively infinite, and the reason dropbox is so popular is that users don't need to think about it - just set it up so it syncs your working documents folder - never mind that a copy of your files is now spinning somewhere in Ktoznaetistan ...

Yet there is a role for corporate filestore - control of crucial documents, be they financial data, research data or what ever. Control does not just mean access it also means measures to ensure the integrity of the data, and by implication the value placed on it.

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