In 5 Things to consider when you’re considering the Cloud for data back-up and archiving, I discussed using cloud storage services for backup and long term data retention (or archiving) purposes. Today let's examine how cloud storage can be an effective platform for sharing, storing and distributing useful content.

Content Sharing and Distribution

Long before people started trusting the cloud as their backup ‘repository,’ the Internet, through a range of capabilities, was being used to store and share information in various forms between users and between organizations.

One of the first applications of cloud storage is the ability to store and share content between users, especially if the files being shared are serving multiple users or cannot be effectively delivered through means such as FTP or e-mail. A couple of weeks ago we mentioned DropBox, a service that has gained popularity mostly among consumers likely largely due to a free space limited service tier and a mobile access option. The web is littered with a multitude of “file sharing” services, many of which are commonly used for underground peer-to-peer activity. This broad category of solutions also spans subscription based services such as YouSendIt that are more effectively designed to bypass e-mail limitations.

The common themes for many of those services are the low (or even free) pricing options designed to convince users about the benefits of the services. There is even an experimental Windows add-on called GMail Drive that allows you to use a Gmail account as a virtual disk drive. Not all alternatives offering extensive security options or guaranteed reliability; your mileage will vary greatly.

For organizations that seek secure and reliable content sharing and distribution, commercial grade cloud storage services and technologies can include other capabilities such as strong authentication, secure transfer, tracking options and functionality to integrate the storage as an extension to another application or web site.

A historic perspective on web content

As you can imagine (and see from this graph supported by UN data), the Internet has gone through tremendous, quasi exponential, growth since 1990. But the world wide web (does anyone still refer to it that way?) grew wider not only in its geographical span and complexity but also in the huge variety of applications and content it supports.

The files comprising this consumable content were originally limited to rather static web pages, images and a constrained variety of files that would be ‘understood’ by web browsers such as Netscape (RIP) and early versions of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Since the early nineties the types of content we can access evolved greatly to support a myriad of unstructured content (i.e. documents) and multimedia types.

Another dramatic contrast is the change in content complexity and sizes we consumed then and now. Not too long ago, relatively speaking, early web users visited pages containing a few images, links to documents and the odd background midi sound file totaling up to several tens of kilo-bytes in size.

Things have evidently changed quite a bit over the years - in an article authored by a Google search engineer several weeks ago the average web page is almost 400 KB in size. No longer constrained by modem era bandwidth speeds, we now gobble up dynamic content that is much richer and encapsulated in data files that are many times larger than what we could dream of what for many of us seems not too long ago.

Web content is versatile and complex

While there are a number of standard mechanisms to transport application data over the Internet, the most pervasive access mechanism to the abovementioned content is HTTP.

HTTP and its secure (and slower) sidekick HTTPS have over the years become synonymous with Internet. These are transport mechanisms supported by the browser you are using to read this blog as well as support secure web based applications and on-line shopping transactions.

The browsers, with their ever increasing capabilities, have evolved as one of the primary means to transport and present content, and through a variety of add-on's present an increasingly rich and multilayered experience users can interact with through numerous devices, including smartphones and even some TVs.

The richness of web content and the great diversity of devices, languages, bandwidth speeds and screen sizes require both content and the systems that supply content to be ever more versatile. Web sites today have the “intelligence” to adapt and optimize the user’s experience based on those and other factors. In order to achieve that, the web content we use is in simpler term an assembly or layer cake of multiple types of content of varying quality and from different sources.

The same Google article mentioned above succinctly illustrates this point through some factual data. Current web pages include on average 30 unique images and represent over 40 distinct sources of information, each requiring the browser to fetch these images and data fragments to assemble a web page we can read.

The richness of the web meets cloud storage

The fragments of data displayed through a web browser can come from a variety of sources and depend on the composition of dynamic and static content being pulled from various sources. While some of these sources are proprietary and secure systems such as the databases containing information, others can be more open content repositories that are optimized for delivery of content objects.

Let’s use an online travel booking site for example.

Consumers looking for hotel properties for their next vacation will search the hotel or travel site looking for properties that meet criteria such as star ratings, amenities and room availability. Information such as pricing, availability and even reviews will be predominantly textual and prone to change, therefore originate from data systems and are formatted for display in real-time. Much of the compelling content a hotel property may use to convince you into booking a vacation (beyond a great price) is visual – ranging from basic pictures of the property and amenities to captivating 360 degree virtual tours of guest rooms and videos of activities the property offers.

This type of content, albeit visually appealing is relatively static. The same digital assets (multimedia files of different kinds) can be displayed to any user browsing through the hotel web site, shared between different properties of the same hotel chain or even used by other travel sites and affiliates promoting this property.

While you can still pick up a glossy printed brochure at the local travel agencies these are becoming a thing of the past, online alternatives have evolved to provide a richer and more compelling buying experience as well as a more efficient and effective means to update content and adapt it based on the user, device or the popularity of the content.

Content Delivery Networks

Another approach that is often used for the last 15 years or so is a Content Delivery Network (CDN for short). These services are designed to replicate copies of files (often images, multimedia and even software applications such as mobile apps) to servers (known as Points of Presence – POPs) globally and maintain an up-to-date repository (cache) that would be accessible to users and their various devices with minimal delay.

While CDNs were originally developed to address issues like shopping cart abandonments, there are numerous free and commercial CDN options today in the marketplace that have evolved significantly with the growth and proliferation of the Internet, including services that are optimized for delivery of mobile content, flash content, small objects (small images) or large objects (electronic delivery of software for example).

Cloud Storage and CDNs are interrelated and share some similarities and benefits. One such great benefit is achieved by replacing static and sometimes rich and heavy content within a web page with a reference to an object stored on the cloud. That way resource demanding content (due to size or repetition) is offloaded from the web servers such that web sites are able to scale significantly better.

Depending on the situation some web sites will work better with one approach, in others both approaches can provide a complementary solution.

Shawn Myron is the director of products and services for TELUS hosting and data centres.

The vastness of the Internet and human ingenuity creates new breeding ground for innovative forms to share and consume content through the Cloud. Cloud storage entails several characteristics that allows it to be used as an abstracted utility for storing and retrieving these content objects. Stay tuned for the next time where we weigh in on the benefits and risks of cloud storage. If you have any specific questions about the cloud or what you're reading here, please leave a comment.