Cloud Computing: With cloud comes rain...

In the past few months it has become apparent that the next leap forward in the standard computing experience is Cloud Computing.

Now for those of you who are sitting there with images of floating around on your laptop, cloud computing is defined as: "The practice of using a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet to store, manage, and process data, rather than a local server or personal computer."

Basically, all of your documents (and more recently, your programs/applications) are stored on the internet (well, a company's server), instead of on your actual computer.

As with any new computing concepts (although it is not strictly a new concept), there are a number of pros and cons.

I'll start with the pros:

• You don't need a high-powered computer as the cloud does all of the processing for you.
• Because of this, you can save money when buying a computer as you need minimal disk space and processing power as all of the applications and documents are stored on the cloud.
• There is no need to spend hours downloading the latest updates. All of the applications are stored on the cloud, and will consequently be updated directly on the cloud, so you will be getting the latest version of the software.
• You can access your files anywhere. Whether it is at home, at work, or out and about on your phone. You no longer need to keep copying your files to a memory stick and carrying it about with you.
• Improved reliability. If your computer crashes or there is a power cut, you will not lose any data as none of it is stored locally. You can just boot back up and carry on where you were.

The cons:

• If you don't have internet access, you can't access your files. Simple. What happens if you are on the train with no WI-FI, or your home internet access is down (quite a common occurrence). Storing files locally may cost more, or take longer, but at the end of the day, your files are always within reach.
• Suitable bandwidth. When I say you need internet access, I don't just mean a dial up connection. You need a considerable amount of bandwidth to load the applications and transfer large files. Without broadband, it's not worth it.
• Security. Would you want all of your documents and information stored behind a single username and password? Companies already store (and lose!) enough of our information, do you really want to hand over all of your private documents to be potentially read by someone else?
• Reliance on company servers. Even if you have constant internet access, there is still the chance that the company servers could go down and even lose all of your data.
• Limited applications. Currently, the available web-based applications just can't compare to their non-web based counterparts. This could seriously reduce productivity.

Conclusion
Cloud computing a good concept, but is currently best suited for (large) business environments where the client-server model makes sense.
As a standard computer user, I don't want to rely on the internet for when I just want to type up a quick word document, or have to stream the music that I own from another company's server back to my computer (I already have Spotify for that).

At Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference, Steve Jobs claimed that we are moving into a 'post-PC world', with the introduction of Apple's take on cloud computing; aptly named 'iCloud'. While the die-hard Apple fans with lap this up without question, any tech-intelligent users will realise that this is not the death of the PC (as BBC news crudely put it http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-13679926), primarily because a phone, tablet, or cloud based system is, in itself a PC (personal computer).

The prospect of putting all my eggs in one company's basket seems a somewhat daunting idea, and for now, the closest I am going to get to cloud computing is using Dropbox.