Cloud computing

Today I want to discuss cloud computing and cloud storage. The former I have concerns about and the latter I love. Maybe the biggest beef I have with cloud computing is the name. I understand that in the tech industry, there’s the marketing side and the technology side and that the marketers most likely came up with the term “the cloud.” It is an effective marketing tool for this technology but I think that this phrase serves to make something simple seem mysterious and thus fool people into not seeing what is actually happening in the progression of technology. When computers were first developed, like those huge ones that took up entire rooms, you had the actual computing technology in a big machine and then something resembling today’s computer screens acted as a dumb terminal that allowed you to communicate with the big machine in the room. We called this setup: terminal-server. Then we figured out how to make those computing machines smaller so we created desktops that fitted onto your desk and eventually laptops that fitted onto your lap. Here, the majority if not all of the computing technology lies with your computer at home, not with the somewhat smaller but still big machines called servers that sit at a company’s headquarters. Your computer might occasionally communicate with them but you are mostly independent and self-reliant. We call this setup: client-server. In this phase, software is sold as a product and you control it on your machine. Now we are beginning to see the cloud emerge.

I think that cloud computing technology started to become popular and seen as an opportunity when individuals started spreading their computing across desktops, laptops, mobile phones, and tablets. All the software on these devices needed to communicate with each other so instead of making that happen companies decided to simplify it: instead of communicating with each other they will communicate with one central machine. In the cloud, instead of software being sold as a product, it is now sold as a service. The computing technology no longer lies with your machine but with the software company’s server. In a sense, we have regressed back to the original terminal-server setup. All of your eggs, will be in one basket, quite literally. The cloud is not a mysterious, omnipresent technological force. It’s a big machine in a big room. So what are the dangers here? In the words of Mark Twain, “If you put all your eggs into one basket, you better watch that basket!”

Next week we will look closer at cloud storage offered through Dropbox which I can definitely get behind.