Are you in the cloud about the Cloud? The Cloud has become a new buzz word you’ll being hearing much more of in association with consumer electronics.
We’ve recently heard it with the iCloud by Apple, describing it as an automatic effortless way of storage. Amazon Cloud Drive offers storage for documents, audio and video files. ASUS has pre-loaded Cloud Computing Services on its tablets we’ve seen in the stores just a few days ago. Pioneer Corporation announced their cloud services coming to the car at the CEA Industry Forum last month.
The actual term “Cloud” borrows from telephone in that companies, who until the 1990s offered primarily point-to-point data, began offering Virtual Private Network services with comparable quality of service but at a much lower cost.
The user can simply use storage, computing power, or specially crafted development environments, without having to worry how these works internally, and that is the real secret behind the Cloud that in reality used to be called servers. People simply don’t want to be bothered with how something works; they just want it too work.
Cloud Computing is a means in which information is permanently stored in servers on the Internet and cached temporarily on clients that include computers, smart devices laptops and the list grows with each day. An example, are Android apps which provide common business applications online that are accessed from a web browser, while in turn the software and data are stored on the Internet servers.
That is how it has been done for years but calling storing the material on servers never caught on for many reasons. Not sexy enough and the security of the services containing the uploaded material was an issue that could not be worked thru by privacy advocates thus delaying its adoption.
The Cloud is plagued by the same issues in security. They have been categorized into sensitive data access, data segregation, privacy, bug exploitation, recovery, accountability, malicious insiders, management console security, account control, and multi-tenancy issues. Add to this list hackers posing as customers have purchased the services of Cloud computing for criminal purposes including password cracking and launching attacks on others computers or smart devices using the purchased services.
The Cloud model has been criticized by privacy advocates for the greater ease in which the companies hosting the cloud services control can monitor at will, lawfully or unlawfully, the communication and data stored between the user and the host company. There are also concerns about Cloud providers shutting down for financial or legal reasons which have happened in a number of cases. What happens to the stored material?
We already know of cases where the companies have to say the least, put the cart before the horse. They were selling services that didn’t have all the bugs worked out and as is often the case, what can go wrong did go wrong and the material was lost in the transfer. Not all people back up their material thinking that because this is the Cloud, what can go wrong. Material lost in the cloud that can’t be retrieved because as in the case of the screwed up transporter in bad TV movies, the signal is lost forever.
Cloud computing makes it easy to forget that it depends on a physical data center, servers to be exact. Cloud computing vendors are not all are created equal from conception. There are new and established vendors in this market place so not all have the same knowledge and infrastructure in place to make things work as well as things should work out of the box. It is important that you do what you more than likely won’t do and do what is necessary to understand and verify the operations, management processes and mechanisms that the cloud provider has in place to make it work as seamless as is possible.
You are trusting the Cloud you have picked with information, personal or sensitive important information. You will lose control that you had when you did the same things for yourself.
There are some analysts and vendors that we have talked to define Cloud computing narrowly as an updated version computing using virtual servers available over the Internet. No matter how you define it you’re still dealing with a server that is not in your hands.
Is the Cloud simply convenience for a busy world? Is it worth it to let others do what you were doing yourself? Is it a good backup for data? Is the possible loss of privacy worth it? Is the added cost that you will sustain by letting others store your material for you worth it? Do you have a fast enough internet connection to reload the material when you need it?
All things that should be given thought to before you go on the Cloud.