Google takes wraps off Google Drive ... finally

It’s been rumoured for long enough but Google has finally taken the wraps off its cloud storage offering, Google Drive.

The company has stolen a march on its competitors, Dropbox and Microsoft, by offering a maximum storage capability of 1TB, as opposed to the 100 GB from its rivals. Google is offering 5GB as a basic free service.

In a blog post, Sundar Pichai, Google SVP for Chrome & Apps even drew attention to the abundance of rumours about the launch, "Just like the Loch Ness Monster, you may have heard the rumors about Google Drive. It turns out, one of the two actually does exist,” he wrote.

One of the key features of the new service will be the search technology (as would be expected from Google). As well as keyword searches, Google Drive users will be able to search old scanned documents by using OCR technology. The company also claimed that the technology would allow searches of photographs by using image recognition technology. As Pichai pointed out, this would mean users could drag and drop photos from a Grand Canyon trip into Drive and a later search for [grand canyon] would mean that photos of its gorges would pop up. He did warn however, that “this technology is still in its early stages, and we expect it to get better over time."

While G Drive is aimed squarely at consumers, it will cause some headaches for enterprises. Richard Edwards, principal analyst at Ovum has warned that employees will start using the service within office environments."Corporate emails systems are notorious for their measly storage quotas and message attachment size limitations, and so the sharing and distribution of large corporate files, such as PowerPoint presentations, engineering drawings, and creative content, are an obvious use case for Google Drive"

But he said that the unsanctioned use of cloud storage services such as G Drive presents a real headache for corporate governance, risk, and compliance managers. Edwards said that companies should be encouraging their employees to use business-grade cloud drive and collaboration solutions, such as Box and Huddle. These deliver user friendly, device agnostic, content sharing features similar to Google Drive but also feature management and administration capabilities that Ovum deems essential from a compliance and audit perspective."