In true Apple fashion, iCloud was unveiled at yesterday’s WWDC in San Francisco to much fanfare and applause. Lots and lots of applause. The new service, best thought of as replacement for the ill-fated MobileMe, will allow users to sync their data, photos, music, documents and apps across all their devices. Well, as long as the devices are made by Apple or will run iTunes, of course.
As a consumer I’m really quite excited by this service as moving content between my iPhone, iPad and Mac (yes, I’m one of those people) continues to be a huge hassle. I’ve relied on the devices’ email functionality to move photos around and the fact that I still have to use a cable (a cable!) to add music and movies harks back to 2002 and plugging in my first ever iPod (told you I was one of those people).
Apple’s embrace of the cloud proper is long overdue and follows hot on the heels of Amazon’s recent Cloud Drive offering. Like Microsoft and Google, these companies are going all-in on the cloud and are staking their future on what we at Huddle have known since we started our journey in 2006: that being connected to your stuff, wherever you are, is a necessity and not a luxury.
This announcement will no-doubt leave a few consumer-focused backup / sync / storage start-ups cursing their luck and wondering what their next pivot might look like. However, at Huddle we understand that whilst the needs of the enterprise may overlap with those of consumer (great user experience, multi-platform support) there are challenges which tools like iCloud are just not designed to meet.
Advanced security, minimising IP-leakage, user action auditing, single sign-on and enterprise user administration are all baked into Huddle’s content management and collaboration application, as are integrations with a wide range of mobile platforms and legacy content management systems. So whilst iCloud might rain on some of our fellow start-ups parades, we’re happily sitting underneath the umbrella of true business software.
#iCloud #enterprise #sync #Apple