Connecting your apps, files, PCs and devices to the cloud with SkyDrive and Windows 8 - Init

<body> <h1>Connecting your apps, files, PCs and devices to the cloud with SkyDrive and Windows 8</h1> <blockquote> <p><em>Many folks reading this blog are active users of SkyDrive and Mesh, both part of the broad set of Windows Live services (like Hotmail), and the Windows Live Essentials programs (Messenger, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, Mail, and more). With their introduction and with Windows 7, we have talked about how these services really complete the Windows experience. As we developed Windows 8, we thought deeply about how these services can take an even more active role in completing the experience—offering a cloud service for each and every Windows 8 customer and all their PCs (and phones), should you choose to use it. In previous posts (</em><a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/09/26/signing-in-to-windows-8-with-a-windows-live-id.aspx" target="_blank"><em>Signing in to Windows 8 with a Windows Live ID</em></a><em> and </em><a href="http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/09/28/extending-quot-windows-8-quot-apps-to-the-cloud-with-skydrive.aspx" target="_blank"><em>Extending "Windows 8" apps to the cloud with SkyDrive</em></a><em>) we kicked off talking about cloud services, how you can automatically roam your settings to multiple PCs, and how applications can take advantage of this roaming. In this post, we will show you three cool things that you will get by choosing to sign up and use SkyDrive with Windows 8. </em></p> <p><i>This post was written </i><b><i>by Mike Torres and Omar Shahine</i></b><i>, Group Program Managers for SkyDrive. </i></p> <p><i>--Steven </i></p> <hr /></blockquote> <p>A few months ago we <a href="http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_live/b/windowslive/archive/2011/11/22/skydrive-designing-personal-cloud-storage-for-billions-of-people.aspx" target="_blank">published our vision</a> for designing personal cloud storage. While SkyDrive can store all types of files, the category of personal cloud storage is focused on the content that people create or capture themselves. Today we’re going to provide an update on how we expect to deliver our vision for Windows 8 and simultaneously scale to meet the needs of billions of customers who will store hundreds of petabytes of data in our service.</p> <p>We think what people want in personal cloud storage is a single drive that’s available across all of their devices, tailored to the experiences they’re using, providing instant, secure, and private access to their files, and sharing files and folders with people they choose. To bring this to billions of people, our approach is to seamlessly connect the files (and behaviors) that people have today on the PC with the app and device experiences that they will use in the future. Rather than using a patchwork of services, people can use one service to connect to their files – with no compromises. No copying files from one cloud to another just to share or collaborate. No <a href="http://www.whymicrosoft.com/en-us/compare-demo/pages/google-documents-vs-word-web-app.aspx" target="_blank">converting files</a> or having to switch to new apps. No searching across different storage areas to find files.</p> <h3>Delivering personal cloud storage for billions of people</h3> <p>Today we provide personal cloud storage for 17 million SkyDrive customers. These are active customers who use it every month to privately share photos and collaborate on Office documents. We currently store approximately 10 petabytes of user data (one petabyte is a million gigabytes, or a million billion bytes) and we expect to grow that beyond what some of the largest scale services on the Internet support today (for example, Hotmail stores over 100PB of user data, and since we share much of the same infrastructure, we have a lot of deep insights and knowledge about how to scale SkyDrive). These are important numbers for us. We aspire to be a service that people find useful and valuable on an ongoing basis, not just a service that people happen to register for when they get a new device.</p> <p>Growing our infrast </body>