Cloud Computing

Again, when there are more devices out there, there will be a shift from worrying about security and wanting your data on everything. Your computer, your phone, your tablet, etc. Right now, the choices and need to have your data from everywhere is not there yet for most people, but as time goes on, I think things will change. There will also be encryption mechanisms and such to help protect your data.

Trucidation said:

*looks at the huge dead elephant in the middle of the room that has PSN tattooed on it*

QFT.
Another example that I can relate is my boss being furious when the wifi is interrupted at work and the Pandora stream from his Android phone pauses......my music never stops playing because it is stored on my portable players.

hi all :)
my opinion on cloud computing is it saves carrying your data with you on a stick/portable hard drive. there are so many ways of storing data on cloud and my favourite FREE ways are to use google docs (1 GIG)/Microsoft skydrive (25 GIGS) /Amazon cloud (5 GIGS) this is ample storage for my work /college data. and personal files.(rapidshare is also good)

mr pc said:

Remote computing? Been doing it for years...

I don't know how things like photobucket and the like are considered cloud computing, it's just web data storage.

Right now it looks like "Cloud Computing" is just a new term to make something old sound new.

That is in fact exactly right.

The term "Cloud" comes from the traditional icon used to represent the internet in technical drawings. An actual "cloud" icon. So "Cloud Comuting" simply means "Using the internet" but generally refers to using it for specific reasons rather than just reading one way web pages.

In like 20-30 years it will be more prevalent but we are learning hard lessons now with the PSN and Amazon's recent complete cluster failure. If stuff like that does not STOP happening then it'll hurt it's adoption considerably.

Eventually it'll be the way things are, it seems enevitable. And if security is 100% and if bandwidth is 10x what it is now (both directions) and compeltely unlimited AND is completely/universally acessable from any device anywhere at any time... well then, how nice all the proposed benefits will be. Till then... it's going to be a LONG and ROUGH road.

As a concept, I like the idea. Who wouldn't like the idea of having access to all your data, wherever you are, whatever device you're using?

In practice though I can see it failing pretty hard, at least for early adopters. Security concerns aside, I can see contention being the major issue.

In the UK at least, contention is already a problem. I've already written an article on this, so I won't repeat what I've written there, but at the moment even with "Normal" usage, the UK broadband network is getting squeezed at peak times. This is with normal usage, what happens when everyone is trying to down/upload 100's of GB of data per day? Can the network cope? I seriously doubt it.

Also there is bandwidth, in the UK alot of people are stuck on 443Kb/s upload from ADSL Max, ok the ADSL2+ rollout is now in full swing, and FTTC is starting, but honestly it will be years before it's complete. I have over 300GB of data on my machine, and that's not counting programs and Windows files, just uploading that to a cloud backup server on my current connection would take me 8 days. With ADSL2+ 4 days. Add into that the average usage limit for home broadband falls around the 40GB mark, well hopefully you can already see the issue there as well.

severedsolo said:

As a concept, I like the idea. Who wouldn't like the idea of having access to all your data, wherever you are, whatever device you're using?

I think that is the main impetus without a doubt.

severedsolo said:

I have over 300GB of data on my machine, and that's not counting programs and Windows files, just uploading that to a cloud backup server on my current connection would take me 8 days. With ADSL2+ 4 days. Add into that the average usage limit for home broadband falls around the 40GB mark, well hopefully you can already see the issue there as well.

Well, we will have to define what makes up Data. Not everything (all files) would be in the cloud (at least I wouldn't expect it). For example, 300GB of data could include

• 50GB worth of Internet downloads, ISO files, game patches, etc
• 20GB worth of music files.
• 240MB worth of word docs, excel files, text files
• 100GB worth of virtual machines

Now, the files I would want from anywhere would be the word docs, spreadsheets and text files. This would really be my data...as I would define it.