The Water Cooler

No I don’t mean booting your laptop when you’re en route to JFK or O’hare, I mean computing using web 2.0+ programs that have become more prevalent in our daily lives.  Combine this with the recent popular movement to compact portable underpowered devices used specifically for accessing the web.  Specifically, iPhones, Blackberry’s netbooks, compact tablets ect.   There is a real push to put data back onto the sever.  In a cloud computing world, very little content will be ran on the client pc.  Let’s face it, data on the client is dangerous.  Hard drives fail, computers get a virus or can be lost or stolen and files are often only accessible from that machine.  Also, files on client machines are hard to share with a team of authors.  These are all problems that cloud computing solves.  Files that are on the web can be shared with others and are backed up regularly.  They are not specific to one client machine and therefore the file is much safer from being lost by a client computer problem.  Google docs, Zoho, and others are already offering successful cloud computing productivity solutions that allows you to create documents, spreadsheets, presentations and more that all are saved on the web and sharable for collaborative authoring.  The quality of these solutions is now beginning to rival professional client side options such as Microsoft Office or Open Office.  The drive toward cloud computing has caught Microsoft’s attention as they are now looking into integrating a cloud computing solution into future Microsoft Office projects.   

Also, with mobile computing options ever growing, people can use a device to access the cloud on the go instead of at their desktop.  With the cloud, one could take their office with them anywhere they want to.  The blackberry addiction that occurred recently before the iPhone took off, is an indicator of how people can become chained to the work even when away from their desks.  Now we can be productive while waiting in line to buy tickets to a movie, while we wait to get a table at our favorite restaurant, or even while we wait for our car’s oil to be changed.   Now, applications that connect to the cloud can allow us to do things with these mobile devices that even a desktop can’t do.  Examples include GPS specific searches, finding the artist and name of the song playing on the radio, and many more that are being developed all the time.

The risks:

Like every solution, new problems can often arise in place of those that were solved.  In a cloud computing world, data must be safeguarded.  The main way this is managed currently is through passwords and security questions.  Like most of you, I have nearly a dozen passwords that I often forget, and I feel uncomfortable choosing a canned security question that anyone who stalks me could figure out.  Therefore, for cloud computing to be the norm, we must find a better way.  We’ve all heard the risks of moving toward biometrics, but this could be part of the solution.  Perhaps if we had one central authentication system that was secure and could plug into different web applications, we could pull off a complete cloud computing system.  However, such a system will always be a security risk. 

Finally, with data in the cloud, can we ever be complete sure it is ours?  If it is on a server somewhere, can someone else access it and take our ideas?  These sorts of conspiracy theories definitely have some merit.  Do you feel comfortable having your personal diary in a place where everyone can see it?  Some might, but a good handful of people would prefer to keep it on their client computer even if it was password protected somewhere in the clouds.

The movement toward cloud computing has already begun.  This is why Microsoft is bleeding programmers and Google is growing.  However, until we mitigate the risks, cloud computing will remain, well where it currently is, out there in there in the clouds.

Tags: Cloud Computing, Web 2.0

This entry was posted on Monday, November 3rd, 2008 at 4:55 pm and is filed under Converging Technologies, Technology Trends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.