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For those businesses and home network users worried that their backup methods may not be as robust as necessary to protect their information, Google is offering an alternative. Google is preparing to take the covers off its own brand of hosted-storage services.

With this offering, customers would be able to save files normally kept on personal computers on Google’s servers instead. After signing on with a password, users would be able to access files such as word-processing documents, digital music, video clips and pictures from a variety of computers via the Internet.

The service is designed to offer a set amount of storage for free, while extra space will be available for an undisclosed price on a subscription-based platform.

Increased mobility of end users and the rapid proliferation of stored digital content, including photos, video and music, is driving businesses and home users toward fixed fee-based online storage systems that can meet growing storage needs without relying on spinning and space-constrained hard drives.

Many experts in the field view the freedom and flexibility that comes with the ability to access personal or even business storage files from any device or PC as another attraction of online storage. Users will have the ability to quickly upload, share or see their files through a high-speed Internet connection. Students and campuses have long touted such an arrangement as a cost-effective storage option.

This concept of storage took flight roughly five years ago with SAAS (software as a service) provider Salesforce.com, which delivers applications to customers through the Internet, and Amazon.com, which has been offering servers and storage services through the Web.

Despite its vast resources, Google is a late entrant into the hosted-storage arena, observers noted. Microsoft in August announced its free 500MB online storage service dubbed Windows Live Skydrive. Another Google rival, Amazon.com, last month guaranteed 99.9 percent uptime for its year-old S3 online storage offering, while Facebook in September unveiled its open Data Store API program.
Even EMC Corp. has driven a stake into the hosted-storage landscape with its October agreement to buy start-up Berkeley Data Systems Inc. and its popular Mozy online backup business for USD 76 million.

Google has already started adding extra storage for users of its Gmail Web-based e-mail service, which has been burning up capacity because of large digital files being stored such as photos and attachments.