A lot has been said over the past year about the cloud computing. It’s been mainly about moving this service or that application “into the cloud”. We’ve always been pretty ‘meh’ about the whole affair, so lets look at what cloud computing really is. And what kinds of things are being moved into the cloud?

If you’re sitting in an airplane with your laptop it certainly is not cloud computing. The definition of cloud computing is kind of nebulous (pun intended). The crux is that it allows you perform certain tasks, much like your desktop applications but on a remote server, for instance Google Docs. In effect, you leverage the computing power and the software environment of the online or ‘cloud’ service. Data, area all accessed from a cloud of online resources. Users can access these resources and their data from anywhere using just a browser. Therefore, it becomes a great tool to synchronize information, leaving you to not be restricted by the specific machine you normally use. You can start being productive from any PC with a internet connection. Your documents simply get loaded from the cloud. This kind of application support is knows as SaaS (software as a service).

So what are the advantages? And where will cloud computing take us? The advantages are present – no version issues, an no upfront costs in software licensing, to name a few. Netbooks are only the first wave of devices that will eventually come out once cloud computing takes of in a big way. Devices will move towards being ultra portable and highly stripped down near empty shells, with much of their computing taking place in the cloud. Many are looking at the cloud as a viable platform for an operating system.

Cloud services aren’t all about productivity either. They cloud can be about fun. Another service that is served up to you from the cloud in internet radio. With services such as last.fm or your music being streamed to your cell phone via cloud services such as Winamp remote, it is now becoming possible to leave the MP3 player at home and tune into the cloud. Cloud computing even allows hardware to utilized remotely.

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, also known as “EC2”, is a commercial web service that allows paying customers to rent computers on which to run their own computer applications. Some people abroad have already begun downloading their torrents on these EC2 virtual comps and streaming them straight onto the screen. Sounds like a very nice picture right? Nope not quite. For people to start depending on the cloud, certain infrastructure prerequisites need to catch up.

Connections have to become more stable, secure, and much faster. There is alos the issue of server-side failure. That means answering the question of “what if the cloud disappears?”. As the cloud becomes more lucrative as a destination for your data, instances such as the Tiwtter leak, the many Gmail outages and now the T-Mobile fiasco have made it clear that it is not as reliable as we might think. The ubiquity of the internet is what has resulted in the feasibility of devices such as the SideKick, which stone all user data on the cloud.

Now, however, the illusion that your data is safest in the cloud is lost. Last month T-Mobile SidKick customers had been facing a total outage, with no access to their data, with a lack of local storage this meant that a simple restart of the devices would mean a total loss of all your private data.

Article by Digit Magazine