That’s the other serious issue with keeping everything on-line.
Bandwidth limitations. Costs from mobile devices are ludicrously high and ludicrously limited (forget streaming HD movies!), and providers are moving to limit even cable internet usage. NO WAY I want to be paying money for the mere priviledge of downloading my own damned content, or worse, to be told I’ve hit some cap and either have to pay more, or stop using it for a week or two.
I just don’t see enough benefits to moving to the cloud, to offset the downsides.
There just aren’t enough security measures to insure that my data stays out of everyone elses hands. I’m supposed to trust all of my data to a system that as of right now leads to my credit card number being stolen ever 3 years or so? The same systems where we hear about millions of customers having their addresses and account info being stolen?
Me too.
I assume you regularly place the latest backup in a safe deposit box, with several drives in the rotation schedule?
If a backup isn’t off-site, it isn’t a backup.
Or even if there’s no failure. I regularly switch between several different computers/portable devices and Dropbox makes the transition seamless.
Another nice thing is the revision history. A few times I’ve accidentally saved over n old version of a file with something broken. No problem–just sync back to an older revision. I also get this with Carbonite, though with them the main purpose is backup.
Wasn’t there an attempt years ago to market stripped-down PCs with no hard drives that were intended to rely on remote storage? Sounds like the same old. I doubt having physical custody of your data is going to become obsolete anytime soon.
The Web was created to provide decentralized communications, why re-centralize?
The cloud is of limited usefulness to me with today’s technology. Data transmission speeds are far too slow and too costly for large amounts of video files. Imagine what is required to upload and maintain 40TB of data and you have an idea of the magnitude.
I think though that the data is really only centralized in concept. So although you see your data stored in one place, in actuality it is probably spread across multiple drives on multiple servers in multiple locations. Is your data any less centralised then in the Cloud than it is on your hard drive?
I do have the concerns that others have though about security, and don’t store sensitive data in the Cloud. That’s probably irrational of me, as the security on my Cloud storage provider’s systems is unlikely to be any weaker than on my home devices. I do use it for things such as my photos and music collection; if someone wants to steal that, they can go right on ahead. If they’d like my collection of Mongolian throat singing and pictures of me and my dog they’re welcome.
I don’t understand any concerns about data loss. All of my data is synched between my devices and my Cloud storage. If my Cloud storage provider somehow manages to lose my data, well I still have my copy.
Lastly cost. I have a 50GB Dropbox and a 25GB Skydrive which cost me nothing (although I do pay for my 512GB Livedrive). I can well imagine that many people could sastisfy all of their storage needs for free.
Chromebooks are like that, and they have been selling very well lately. They do have small hard drives, but they are very much aimed at using cloud storage and web apps. They’re fairly useless without an internet connection. But, users seem to like them, as secondary or light-use computers.
As for the general question, I think it depends what you mean by using the cloud. Like others here I use Dropbox, Google Drive etc., and to me it seems the best of both worlds. The stuff is all stored locally, automatically synced to the devices I use, and it aslo gives me backups, with previous versions of the files, online. After the initial upload, it even works quite well on slow connections. What’s not to like?
If it means using cloud storage exclusively then no, I don’t think the connections and infrastructure are quite reliable enough yet for that.
The thing that gets me is that when I was in school, I did work on an X-terminal, which is basically a computer that is only capable of accepting keyboard and mouse input, and drawing some graphics primitives on the screen. The “real” computer was one of a bunch of servers located in the IT areas. Their drives held all your stuff, and interaction was done over the network from your X-term. It was set up so that when you logged in, you automatically got logged in to the server with the lowest load, and your home directory was on a networked drive so you’d have your work no matter which server you’d logged into.
If that setup was invented today, it would be the ultimate in cloud computing: storage, processing, and interaction all taken from different places on the fly and integrated seamlessly as needed.
So this computing model is not very new, in fact some aspects of it are older than desktop computing. It’s just that some models make more sense as certain aspects of computing become cheaper relative to others. When processing power was expensive, having it centralized and “renting” it made sense. When processing power became cheaper, but networking was still slow it mad more sense to have local processors, and therefore local disks even if the disks weren’t as reliable as data centre disk space. As network speeds pick up, it makes sense to have the disks remote from the processor again.
Because my stuff is so important. :rolleyes:
Obviously, only you can answer how valuable your data is. For business data, this can be quantified. For personal data, it ranges between worthless and priceless.
For me, $60 a year is extremely cheap insurance for my most precious data, such as my photos. It is not a complete backup system but it is an important part.
A relative of mine semi-recently lost all of her photos and personal documents in a fire. An external drive would not have helped. I gave her a laptop to replace her computer but I could do nothing about the important stuff. With a cloud service she would not have had to think twice about getting her data back.
I’m with you on this one. Yeah, I do use Dropbox for some things (mostly files I want to pass to someone else), but I mistrust backups of such private info as tax returns and such being outside my possession. I don’t know the employees of that cloud backup service and don’t know what security is in place to keep someone unscrupulous from engaging in some identity theft, fraud, etc.
If you don’t have too much sensitive data, you can make a TrueCrypt container, store your documents in that, and store that in DropBox or whatever. Any time you changed or added a file, DropBox would have to reupload the entire container, so it’s less efficient in that sense, but if your connection is better than my crappy one, it shouldn’t be that large of a burden. Not quite as seamless, but doable.
I use Word and pdf’s encryption, sometimes.
Well, Gmail’s gone down, and I have revised my opinion of the Cloud. It sucks.
The idea of the cloud is great. But realistically I think our uptime is better than the clouds. Maybe in 5 or 10 years they will have achieved true stability.
Just as an anecdote - I was working at a US Defense Department contractor and they were exploring moving some of their enterprise systems to the cloud. Eventually they asked the vendor where the data would be physically located…um, Russia. Oh really, yeah, no thanks.
Network security is my Job. I have to answer to auditors, demonstrate we’re treating the data properly, that the wrong people can’t get to it, and that we know the wrong people can’t get to it.
The cloud gives me the willies, but for reasons not immediately obvious.
When someone breaks into your house and steals your laptop. You dial the local police department.
When someone uses your credit card in a truck stop one-state-over, you have the FBI to help in inter-state jurisdictional stuff.
When someone from Azerbaijan steals your data, hosted in South America, who do you call?
Likewise: there is a Security truism: If someone can touch your hardware, they can own your hardware.
If your stuff is running in a Virtual Machine, at a Cloud Hosting Provider, then the person running the management console doesn’t even have to physically touch your hardware to own it. Or the Baddie that manages to elevate his privileges to that level.
There’s also Murphy’s Law…what happens when your data is shifted to a 3rd party cloud provider after their acquisition, then the Government that controls that portion of the internet turns it off?
Many hosting providers do not charge for uploading your data, and charge reasonable rates to host it…but then charge you to get it back off…do you have that war chest set aside for that possibility? No? Ever had a business relationship go sour?
The reason that Storage places are such a good, safe investment is: If the tennant stops paying, they have his stuff!
Lots of doom and gloom. Frankly, I think in 10 years or so, cloud hosting will be the norm. The niggling issues will have been worked out, and the economy of scale the hosting providers work at will safe lots of money.
I also think it’s a good value for all but the largest companies. A small Mom and Pop shop stores their first byte at a hosting provider and that data is suddenly fault tolerant and redundant…a service they really wouldn’t want to stand up themselves. That data is also protected by Armed Guards, in a facility with back-up generators and multiple connections to the internet.
Encryption and co-location and onsite backups can go a long way to minimise the concerns, but it’s helpful to at least think through the issues first.