I've been hearing a lot lately about the Cloud.
My nerd genes allow me to have an uncanny understanding about these types of terms when they start getting thrown around in an advertising sense but something funny is a brewing with "The Cloud". My spider senses are a tingling with this one because not only am I sure that most people don't really grasp the concept of the Cloud, but the advertisements are portraying the Cloud incorrectly. Before I shed some light on the topic, let's look back through time about 5 years into the history of the Web.
In 2005, the Web was moving strong. Facebook was making its transition to being open to anyone who wanted in. Netflix was starting to jump more into the mainstream. Hulu was just a glimmer in the eyes of network giants. The next (current) generation of internet enabled gaming consoles from Sony and Microsoft were unveiled, both plotting to become the connected center of all of our homes. By all accounts, the Web was exploding.
Digital distribution and consumption also exploded in the last 5 years. Moore's Law firmly grabbed onto any storage medium it could (i.e. hard drives and SD cards) breaking the 500GB mark for the first time in 2005 and planting us firmly in the Terabyte (1024GB) age. The hand-held craze was taking off, led by Apple's iPod and Blackberry smartphones. People were breaking away from desktop computers and looking toward laptops, then netbooks and smartphones and now tablets like the iPad.
A funny and intriguing thing started happening. We wanted to take everything with us everywhere with unfettered access to any of our files from land, sea and air. This has been possible since 2005, but hasn't really been the accepted method until now. We always had to store our files in multiple places if we wanted to access them on multiple machines. Something was happening on the web because of this...a Cloud was forming.
Think of a sky with a single large cloud. You can view the cloud from one location, then move to another location miles away and you can still see the same cloud. Now pull this down to the realm of the computer. Put the cloud up above the web so it can be seen from any location on the web. This is what the Cloud allows you to do. You can access your files stored in the cloud from anywhere on the web.
The best current examples of the cloud that most people are familiar with today are Netflix and Google Docs. While Netflix allows you to access movies it stores from anywhere (in the US or Canada), you don't actually store anything there, so it's really only half cloud. Google Docs, however, allows you to store documents you have created on their servers and access them from anywhere with internet access. True Cloud services are similar to that of Dropbox, which allows you to store and access any file you want on its servers and access them from anywhere, even allowing access to friends or coworkers from their computers.
What really brings me here is a Windows 7 commercial that many are probably familiar with. A couple are sitting in an airport when over the loudspeaker, someone announces that their flight is delayed. They wonder what to do when the assumed husband says "To the Cloud" and the wall spins around and presto chango, there's a laptop that's ready to access their computer at home. Here's the problem: what that computer is doing has been possible for a long time in internet terms and is more of a function of the web than it is the cloud. My Windows XP computer can remotely access another computer via the web without an issue.
If it were really the Cloud, the husband would instead dial up a website where the contents of his home computer are stored and either start streaming the episode from there or drag and drop the file right to his computer. If that couple were using Dropbox, they'd be able to just connect to the internet and the Dropbox folder would synchronize its contents with the cloud and they'd be up and watching whatever they wanted from wherever they wanted in no time*.
Beyond Cloud storage, there are other uses for the Cloud such as Cloud Computing which is basically what the SETI program or Stanford's Folding@Home projects are all about. In the future, I wouldn't be surprised to see all of our digital lives lived in the Cloud instead of in local storage. Computers, game consoles, MP3 players and smartphones will all live on the cloud in exchange for smaller internal memory sizes.
The world is becoming more and more Cloud based everyday, which is why it's important to distinguish between the Web and the Cloud. Mark my words: One day we will all be living in a Cloud
Until then always remember
It is the Geeks that will inherit the Earth
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