Dive Brief:
- Dropbox announced Project Infinite Tuesday at Dropbox Open London, its UK user conference, to try and push the bounds of traditional storage capacity as companies continue to boost the amount of data they use and interact with daily.
- Project Infinite is designed to "reimagine how people find, access and collaborate with large amounts of data," the company said in its announcement.
- The project is designed to allow users to "seamlessly and securely" access to all their Dropbox files, regardless of the space available on their hard drives.
Dive Insight:
As evidenced by the project's name, Dropbox is trying to create "Infinite," or unlimited, storage for its users. Rather than accessing stored files via the web, the company wants to move that access to the desktop. The project has the added benefit of freeing up room on a user's hard drive.
With the advent of the cloud, storage capacity has come a long way. But now, Dropbox is trying to make it more convenient. Because the amount of storage has increased in recent years, the amount of data created and shared has also swelled, posing a potential challenge for enterprises.
Yet there have not been many good answers for how to deal with it. Late last year, an alliance of "old guard" storage companies including Seagate, Toshiba and Western Digital announced they will work with the Linux Foundation to develop the Kinect Open Storage Project, which will strive to provide "open source object storage on next generation, Ethernet-enabled storage devices."
Even though other storage options abound, Dropbox is betting that the seamless desktop integration with the cloud will appeal to customers.
