What and where is “the cloud”, the ethereal space where we carelessly store our important data? Every abstraction-impaired tech expert will gladly school you about the fact that it’s technically nowhere and everywhere, redundantly fragmented across data centers that, ironically, are hosted in enormous heavy-duty facilities that have nothing to share with the fluctuating and light-weight nature of actual clouds. 
And yet, retrieving data on our devices really feels like picking bits out of thin air. So much so, in fact, that grasping where your data actually is has become a sort of underlying ontological issue of modern computing.

Now a cute little idea from Lenovo comes to the rescue. The company’s designers came up with the Awan Storage, a diminutive cloud-based portable hard drive that has the specific function of creating a tangible connection between you and your data hosted in the cloud. It’s still a concept, and we’re not sure it will ever hit the market (that hasn’t stopped the good pals at the International Forum from already giving Lenovo one of their coveted iF Product Design Awards).

The Awan packs no actual storage space (except for the limited amount it needs for its firmware) but it connects to any device via a USB-C or Lightning cable, in the same way an old school external hard drive would. The main difference is that it’s actually still sending all your data to a cloud-based hard drive through an Internet connection, acting as a sort of off-device cloud gateway. The advantage, along with offering a tangible alternative to the software based cloud abstraction layer invisibly integrated into our machines, is that you can connect to the same cloud storage account with different devices.

It’s a great idea, with just one big caveat: while carrying the Awan Storage, you will have the impression of having your data with you, while in reality you’re just holding another little deceiving eidolon, just slightly more tangible than a setting page on your iPhone. As Joni Mitchell once wrote in one of her greatest songs, “we’ve looked at clouds from both sides now, from up and down, and still somehow it’s cloud’s illusions we recall”. You were oh so right, Mrs. Mitchell, we really don’t know the cloud at all.