Nothing on the current Internet scene is bigger than the Cloud. Gmail is there, and Google is staking its future on the Cloud. But then, Google has always been in the Cloud. Social networking, the hottest thing, is all in the Cloud. And Software as a service (SaaS), provided from the Cloud, is a looming overcast over the enterprise marketplace.
The Cloud is as big as the Internet sky, and like an invisible tornado it wants to hoover up everything – your apps, your operating system, the backup drive tucked into a corner of your desk – and whisk your entire desktop to Oz. No more massive operating system taking up half your memory before you open any applications.
But there are a few bumps of turbulence in the cloudy sky. An intruder hacked into the Google Apps Twitter implementation, getting in through the password reset function. (How wonderfully, or dreadfully, ordinary.) This caused a stir for the City of Los Angeles, which is planning a shift to Google email and productivity suites, and triggered a whiff of anxiety among cloud computing advocates.
It also triggered articles in the business press that, like many such articles, play Captain Obvious, reminding you of things you already know but easily forget. Do ask your cloud vendor questions about security. (And really ask; don’t just ask boilerplate questions and accept a boilerplate answer.)
Some particular technology applications favor the Cloud. Server demand can fluctuate widely, for example, and a server farm can assign units as needed. An e-commerce firm with its own servers must either face slowdowns when traffic is heaviest (sale days, for example), or must keep servers that sit idle most of the time. Perhaps it doesn’t hurt that most people with websites, like me, have them hosted somewhere. So we are accustomed to having our websites hosted out in the Cloud.
Other Cloud successes seem due to particular firms and their services, such as SalesForce.com. I don’t have a staff of salespeople, so I haven’t a clue what this SaaS package does, but it must be doing it pretty well because it gets a lot of attention.
Whether the Cloud conquers business computing is going to end up depending mostly on fairly prosaic things like comparative cost of onsite hardware versus cloud services, perceived service quality, and how many people out there come up with killer-app Cloud solutions.
On the consumer side it is more complicated. Are people comfortable storing their personal files off in the Cloud somewhere? Don’t some people wish they could delete some of their Facebook pictures, and really delete them? And I like knowing where the manuscript of my novel is, a copy safely on my backup drive. How safe that really is, is another matter, but I like the feeling. Do I really want to entrust it to the Cloud?
But the mobile Internet will probably win it for the Cloud. My desktop is one thing, but no one expects to keep everything they own, so to speak, loaded into their smartphone. Which won’t keep you from demanding access to all your virtual stuff, whenever and wherever you want it. With a mobile device storing something in the Cloud feels natural. The coming mobile Internet age will probably leave earthbound desktop users like me as quaint fossils, with my external drive still next to my landline phone.