The free cloud storage services in China are attracting an emerging number of corporate clients, as demand to digitalize data has become a rising trend in the country, according to a report by iheima.com, a China-based Internet platform offering services to startups.
According to a joint study by the IBM Institute for Business and the University of Oxford, 90 percent of all the data acquired by human civilization was produced in the past two years. The report said that by 2020, the volume of global data will be 44 times greater than that in 2013.
A Want China Times report said that due to the demand for data centers and the constant growth of its value, Internet tycoons have increased their investment in the sector. Since smart devices function based on essential data collection and storage, cloud storage has become the major factor that connects smart hardware and people.
The report cited the huge volume of data stored by the medical treatment sector in the Internet of Things (IoT) as an example. While the IoT promotes the increase of data in the public sector, gene sequencing techniques in the medical sector have spiked demand for data storage.
A human genome, which comprises three billion nucleobases, would require 3GB in terms of data volume. The report said that for the global population of 7 billion, gene sequencing of every person will need storage of 21 billion gigabytes, or 21 million terabytes.
According to the report, cloud computing technology has been developing in China since 2013 and a rising number of enterprises are now willing to adopt the technology to reduce their costs.
Major online services providers such as Alibaba and Baidu all have their own cloud computing services, while foreign companies like Microsoft, Google and Salesforce have brought their cloud computing services to China.
Chinese Internet platform iheima.com said that the unlimited demand for data storage among enterprises has resulted in strong sales from free cloud storage services than software and technical services.