Cloud computing is the latest battle arena in the computer industry, with various computer firms, big and bigger, competing to exploit the latest rage. Industry watchers predict that the race ‘to dominate cloud computing will increase competition and innovation.’
The concept behind cloud computing reeks of a Darwinian jungle in an Orwellian world. Only the most able will see the race through. ‘The idea is that computing will increasingly be delivered as a service, over the internet, from vast warehouses of shared machines. Documents, e-mails and other data will be stored online, or “in the cloud”, making them accessible from any PC or mobile device.’ If you get to visit your Facebook account and update it many times a day with anything and everything including your multiple albums of baby photos and your best friend’s grandma’s recipe for an entire Chinese lauriat complete with instructional video per dish, then you get a fairly good idea of how much cloud computing should store. Actually, it can very well be much, much more than your overloaded Facebook site, or undeniably more than you can even imagine.
The bigger idea is to have a facility for the user to store practically everything online. Acting like a virtual personal datakeeper, cloud computing makes it easier for the consumer. And it comes cheaper, too, because many cloud services are free. It is subsidized by a minority of users who pay for a premium service, as well as supported by advertisers. Besides, there’s also no need to install any software.
A cloud-based email service also takes away your worries about losing your email due to any unfortunate incident. What’s more, you can access your email from any web browser. The same principle will soon apply to other data and documents.
There are three caveats, though, to cloud computing services:
The danger and inconvenience of a technological lock-in is highly possible to happen. Should you decide to shift to another cloud-based storage, standards and formats may be ‘mutually incompatible.’
Storing so much personal information online is a scary situation with privacy breach implications, especially if you trade some of that personal information to subsidize the cost of services, through advertising and other methods of free service exchange.
Since it is a technological innovation, expect a technological glitch here and there. There is no 100 percent guarantee that stored personal data is absolutely safe. A glitch may lose parts of the stored data.
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