People continue to wail and gnash their teeth at the implications of cloud storage, and they vow to never be a party to it, but it is coming nevertheless.
What this "cloud storage" means is that all your data will be located in a central repository. Or more accurately, fragmented across thousands upon thousands of "cloud" data centers (for optimum redundancy) in which it can be quickly assembled and delivered to any device upon demand, so long as the proper credentials are established at the given device to gain access - mostly username and password today, but soon fingerprints, retina scan or even voice recognition will become the new standards.
The advantages of cloud storage include the fact that your data is stored multiple times at data centers across the world. So if an earthquake takes out the West Coast or if the entire Eastern Seaboard slides into the Atlantic Ocean, your data will still be preserved as it can be re-assembled using the other redundant data centers scattered about the planet. Of course if a large asteroid strikes the Earth and all human life is wiped out, well data storage will be the least of our concerns anyhow.
Already we are seeing cloud storage with respect to multimedia. Much fewer people purchase music on compact discs these days. Instead, they purchase the mp3's online and while they can choose to download the mp3 to their local computer, they will always have it available in the cloud to stream or re-download it if they wish. Ditto for video content. Millions of people now stream TV shows and movies from content providers like Netflix and Hulu. Soon, DVDs will be as rare as videocassettes.
If you already use a backup service for your personal data such as Mozy or Carbonite, you have already been assimilated into cloud storage of your data.
Consider the case of the poor soul who meticulously backed up all his data on local drives and storage media. Then one day his house burned down and he lost his primary computer and backup storage all in one shot. Well, cloud storage would have allowed this person to download all his personal data, his photos, his work files, his writing, etc, onto new computer devices.
So cloud storage is coming and it's here to stay. Eventually you will be able to order a PC, a tablet or a MacBook Pro and have it delivered to you with all your data including all your software and settings from your old devices. All you need to do is authenticate with your new device and it will be there waiting for you. Every single keystroke you make will be sent to the cloud so you never have to hit the "save" button again.
As I manage several hundred PCs as part of what I do, I am constantly asked what laptop or pc or whatever to buy.
I tell every one of them to find the features they want, buy the box as cheap as they can(laptop or pc, mac) and buy an SSD. Most people listen to me and I usually image their new HD onto an SSD and they are astonished at how fast the machine is.
I build computers for myself, my family and all the specialty equipment machines at work(cheap run of the mill whatever boxes for everything else). I only put spinning platters in when I need big capacity. Everything else gets SSDs. In the last several years, I’ve purchased at least 25 SSDs, and capacity is growing every time. Smallest I get now are 256gb. Samsung EVOs or Pros mostly.
While cloud storage is great for backups, it blows if you don’t have a network connection. Until the network is ubiquitous everywhere you go, you’re only going to backup to the cloud and store non-essentials out there. While you can tether to your phone and pick up wifi here and there, it’s not everywhere yet.
There’s also the issue of data security. No company is going to put strategic path data out into some nameless server farm on the internet. Could you imagine Walmart not being able to ring up sales because “the cloud is down”? Not going to happen. There will always be local copies of critical data. Always and forever.
Not to mention that if you can’t stand on your data and defend it with a gun, you don’t own it. Some IT dude in a different part of the world could make off with your secrets...what are you going to do about it? It’s 2 months later when you’ve figured it out.
Cloud computing has a place that will grow in importance, but it will never supplant local access entirely and this is where the SSD will be king.
I'd be willing to bet that most of the firms that offer cloud based storage are leveraged to the gills, leasing their data centers, their servers, their storage. For those that are fastest growing in the sector, what happens to the customer's data when they skip a few months' payments in the next downturn and the repo men come to take the drives/SSDs?
The way the risk/reward ratio works these days practically drives new entrants to that approach, and, no, I have no idea what to do about it!
The cloud will never win. It has too many problems. Not the least of which being what happens when you lose connectivity. And on the personal level there’s the fact that lots of us have stuff on our computer we don’t want out in the world.
The simple fact is the cloud is a step backwards, it’s going back to the hub/ thin client model. Technology doesn’t go backwards it goes forwards. It’s why trains won’t replace cars.
The big reason buying MP3s has replaced buying CDs is because listening to MP3s has replaced listening to CDs. People buy a CD rip it and never touch it again. This replacement had already happened before anybody started adding the cloud to their MP3 selling method. That’s just a checkbox feature to compete with other MP3 sellers.
The stream can’t replace ownership. What we’re seeing is people deciding they don’t need to own a movie, they’re OK finding it (or not) on stream. But anything you actually want to have available you don’t want to stream because every couple of years there’s a good chance what you want will no longer be on your stream service.
People have been predicting a return to the thin client for longer than the 20 years I’ve been in software. The name keeps changing, the inaccuracy of the prediction remains the same.
Great post!
While I believe most of what you stated is quite accurate, if not spot-on, the biggest limiting factor will be the overall lack of bandwidth of the WAN(Wide Area Networks) and or Internet in our country. For it all to become a reality, most businesses will need more than a couple of T1s for their ‘pipe’ out to the Net, and that’s when you start getting into ‘real money’. After the initial ‘push’ into the “Cloud”(God I hate that buzzword as it’s commonly used), the throughput/bandwidth requirements isn’t as bad as most folks would think. Once the data is in place, only differential data needs to be uploaded to storage. Using compression for the transfer, it can be efficient.
Having said that, If I own a business, I’m running a ‘Private Cloud’.(this is what I built at work) No way in hell am I going to entrust my data to some location on the other side of the country, or world for that matter - to be physically managed/accessible to anonymous people. That’s not even getting into the many scenarios of snooping/espionage by .govs and others who may not have the best interests of my company in mind. For those that don’t run their own “Cloud”, STRONG encryption will be paramount. Both for the storage itself, and for the transmission of data.
Regarding what I consider to be the horrible state of the Internet, just imagine what could have been done in our country with all of the money wasted on TARP, (non)stimulus, and other bailouts/boondoggles during recent years. We could have developed a real WAN infrastructure comparable to the Interstate Highway system, but for data networks. Gigabit connections to every business/residential area. Combinations of fiber and 4G Wireless everywhere. Many of the displaced employees of ISPs, ect that work within the current infrastructure could have been hired on to work on and maintain the new one. I tend to be very Libertarian on most things, but if the government is going to ‘print’/borrow/waste money, it might as well put it toward something useful.
No offense intended, but one of the iron laws of technology is that stupid ideas never die, they just come back with a trendier name. The fact is that “cloud” computing was already used several decades ago, and it proved inferior to stand-alone computers. It just wasn’t called the “cloud,” it was called the “workstation.”
Central application-hosting and storage were originally introduced because of technological and financial limitations (i.e. processing power was expensive). But the workstation model did prove two things: the limitations of individual workstations overrode the supposed benefits of not having to outfit an entire computer for every employee, and computer and software manufacturers LOVE the workstation model, because it increases both the dependency and cost of abandonment (see Sun Microsystems for a case in point). What tech company wouldn’t love to have total control over your hardware and software, with the cost of your going elsewhere being prohibitively expensive?
If the workstation model was efficient, it would not have been abandoned when the cost of stand-alone PCs dropped to an affordable level (especially since the “connectivity” was much better internally than the internet will ever be). That was obviously not the case. The Google (and Microsoft, et al.) dream of simple, cheap front-end computers with all of the apps and content hosted elsewhere is nothing more than the technology of the past with a new paint-job.
P.S., only urban-dwellers on the East or West Coast could assert that internet connectivity is near “universal.” All that the cloud is going to do is force companies to relocate to urban areas... and it’s not like this country needs larger and more politically powerful cities...