From Enterprise to Everyone: Five Technologies Now Available to Us All

Technology is always changing and evolving. From the IBM System/360 to today’s MacBook Air, we’ve seen tremendous changes in the way we use and think about technology. Technology itself has become an integral part of our lives and even the most complicated, enterprise-only products of yesterday are becoming readily available to the SMB and consumer. Here are five such technologies, identified by Mobolize, that just a few years ago were unavailable to everyone outside of larger businesses with dedicated IT departments. Today, they’re ever-present parts of our society that many of us can’t think of living without.

Click through for five products that were once business-only, but are now available for all, as identified by Mobolize.

Although originally services designed for businesses, like Salesforce.com, public clouds are now available to everyone. With the ability to store and share large volumes of data, services like Dropbox and Google Docs allow sharing of cloud-stored documents, audio and video on demand.

Once filling whole rooms, the server has evolved from a multi-thousand dollar behemoth to a $25 device that can fit in the palm of your hand. They used to be notoriously complicated to grasp for students of computer technology and laymen, but now the Raspberry Pi servers come with special “New Out Of the Box Software” (NOOBS, for short) that greatly simplifies installation of an operating system.

Backup and disaster recovery used to be complicated and the province of businesses that had to protect their data. But everyone now has incredible amounts of precious data to protect, such as photos and financial records. Disaster recovery has come to consumers in the form of Mozy, Carbonite, etc. Recent events have made these companies all the more popular and necessary as customers and businesses alike find their private data under threat from natural disasters and power outages.

Modern wireless data exchange systems have evolved beyond the large wireless access point boxes of , which only businesses had the budget or the room for, into the inexpensive, portable consumer devices of today. The ability to wirelessly connect to the Internet easily and cheaply has never been more popular.

It used to be that only large businesses sent and received enough data over the Internet to worry about optimizing the network with big iron solutions like WAN optimization controllers. But the mobile revolution, driven by the smartphone, puts consumers and SMBs in a position of wanting faster access to content while keeping an eye on the cell phone bills. New Endpoint Web Optimization technologies address the problem and give users their own answer to optimization.