Computing in the Cloud

Cloud Computing, it seems a buzz word these days, with various companies vying for customer attention. Thinking about it, from a personal perspective, as a consumer, it makes a lot of sense. If you've used computers for more than a few years, you'll have accumulated quite a bit of digital data by now. You will have, I'm sure as I have, struggled (to a certain degree at least) with backups of all that data. Another issue is having multiple computers and keeping data in-sync and/or at least available from any of those puters.
There are of course varying ways to solve the issue(s) of data availability, access and backup. However, with a large degree of certainty we can say that most of the solutions that we come up with (file servers or other forms of sharable centralized storage), will eventually fail, since ultimately they all rely on harddisks. Not to mention the issue of accessing all your data when you're on the move.
I'm not even seriously considering Tape backup as an option for my 'consumer' oriented usage.

When I analyze the nature of my data, I can segregate into 3 main categories:
1. Entertaiment (movies, music)
2. Personal memories (photo's, files)
3. Administrative data

At the moment I don't know of any well-known services that can handle the first category 'in the cloud'. I have heard of some that do this for music and of course there is Youtube for the short 10 minute type videos of personal nature.

For the second and third categories, there are now a myriad of services available in the cloud that when you think about it make a lot of sense. With regards to personal memories; photos is a big one and being able to safely store that 'in the cloud' is pretty valuable and very convenient for me. Having my precious photos available from any Internet connected puter or mobile device and not having to worry about backups, eventually failing HD's, which will cause me to loose if not all, at least some of my precious memories. Its a pretty compelling kind of service to me and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one.
That to me demostrates the power of computing 'in the cloud' and I haven't even touched on the services provided by the likes of Google (with Google Apps) and other that allow you to create Office compatible docs online and even allow for collaborative working on your docs. Yet another powerful example of 'cloud computing'.

The business perspective, as in how can businesses 'cash in' on the value proposition of 'cloud computing' is not entirely clear yet. Intuitively we can feel that there is going to be lots of value for business too (the value proposition seems somewhat akin to Outsourcing of your infrastructure, but with a plus). However, there are other factors to take into account such as security that make public cloud computing a lot less appealing for them. Creating virtual private clouds on the other hand (to combat the security issue) seems to take away some of the intrinsic value of having your date available at any time, from anywhere and sharable with anyone...

Very interesting times indeed!!

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