The information superhighway has lifted off and taken to the skys. Cloud computing is no longer the wave of the future -- it's happening right now. Actually, it's been happening for years, but the trend toward moving applications and storage to the Web is accelerating so quickly that it might not be long before powerful desktop computers with massive hard drives become passe.
In the nightmare scenario of Luddites everywhere, The Computers have been entrusted with mankind's accumulated knowledge. All is well until that fateful day when the machines band together, creating a mammoth, all-powerful, living network that thinks, grows and takes over the Earth.
Think "The Terminator" or "Colossus: The Forbin Project."
These days, the geek buzzword for this is "the Cloud" and the catchphrase is "Cloud computing."
The Future Is Now
First, the bad news, at least for the Luddites: The Cloud is already here.
You may also know it as the Internet. And while the whole thing could end up with robotic overlords in the sky, the good news is that the Cloud makes life easier for folks willing to trust it.
The premise of Cloud computing is that your data isn't kept on your desktop computer. Instead, it's stored online behind password-protected encryption. You access it via your Web browser.
Your desktop PC is no longer a security risk. Your data cannot be eaten. You can't lose your data because it's all on the same hard drive under the desk.
"For most of us, Cloud computing essentially refers to keeping much of the data and processes that traditionally have been kept on our desktop computers to the Web," says Adam Pash, an editor at Lifehacker, a productivity blog that covers the Cloud and ways of using it. "That means, for example, rather than storing your to-do list on your computer, you may be using a Web application that stores your list 'in the Cloud"' -- on a remote Web server that you can access from any computer.
This is of value for road warriors, says Pash, who are constantly on the go and using different devices to get to crucial information. It's also beneficial for those who work with multiple computers. Instead of multiple sets of data that are constantly out of sync, every machine uses the same data set.
And for folks with a single machine, Pash says, the Cloud provides a reliable backup for important files. If their hard drive crashes, all that vital information isn't lost forever.
To the Web
The key concept behind the Cloud is Web application, which is software stored on some company's server and accessed by users through their Web browsers. That means everything is done through the same window used to surf Web sites. Other than some small scripts downloaded to the desktop, all the software used and the data produced remains in the Cloud, i.e. on the main servers of the company.
While terms such as "Cloud" come and go, the notion of doing things online goes back to the earliest days of the consumer-oriented Web. The first application to go wholesale to the Cloud was e-mail .
Instead of loading and uploading messages to a desktop, thus exposing the computer to viruses and trojans, Web mail programs did everything in the browser.
The first Webmail service, called Web Mail, went online in 1995.
Within two years, Hotmail (later purchased by Microsoft) was launched. At last count, Media Market (as reported by the TechCrunchblog) estimated there were nearly 500 million Webmail users worldwide.
These days, Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO) Mail offers unlimited storage and most of the big boys -- AOL, Windows Live/Hotmail, Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) Mail -- offer 5 gigabytes or more.
For most users, that's enough so that they never have to delete a single e-mail to conserve space.
During the Web 1.0 boom, there was an explosion of free, online storage sites, followed by a glut of synchronization sites.
Typically, services such as Yahoo Briefcase and X Drive (now owned by AOL) required users to upload files.
Others, such as eDock and Visto (both defunct), used software on a desktop machine to keep online files in sync with desktop files.
While the storage and sync herds have thinned, there are now dozens of online applications that ape what computer programs do.
More Reliable Cloud
Media storage sites such as Flickr.com and MP3Tunes let users have access to their photos and music from any computer and many handheld devices. Other programs are focused on productivity.
ThinkFree and Zoho are Web-based bundles of e-mail, word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and e-mail programs in one suite. Other sites, such as Desktop Two, go the extra step and present a desktop, complete with online icons that copy the look and feel of a computer's desktop.
Consumers were the first to adopt Cloud applications, said Joshua Rand, CEO of Desktop-Two parent Sapotek, and business is now taking up the mantle.
In the past, businesses were reluctant to venture into the Cloud because of money, to wit: Companies for years spent a lot of money purchasing their own servers and building their own Cloud, i.e., a shared network for their company.
Given that level of investment, many have been slow to make the change.
But now, as companies see the need to upgrade their capabilities, they see a more developed and reliable Cloud. Many find it's now cheaper to migrate to the Web Cloud than invest in their own server farm.
Easy Connectivity
The newest trend in the Cloud, built with business in mind, is collaboration.
Sites such as Drop.io and Google Docs allow people to work together, in real time, to compete in the 24/7 world of business.
"I like to say that the killer app of the Internet is people," says Sam Schillace, an engineering director for collaborative applications at Google.
"That's the most interesting. The interesting thing about putting your data online is that you can connect that data to other people very easily."
Weeks spent ferrying documents between offices or cubicles can be cut to minutes on the Cloud because entire teams of coworkers can access documents simultaneously. Or, outside of the office, members of a bridal party can tweak "to-do" lists in unison, even though they are time zones apart.
Data stored in the Cloud is safe, said Schillace, one of the main forces behind Google Docs, a free, online office suite that mimics many of the features of Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) Office.
Google, for example, has behemoth server farms all over the world. A document might be saved on one Google server in the U.S., but backups might be saved -- and updated every time the document is edited -- on servers scattered around the globe.
"[TheCloud] is a desktop for people without a computer," said Rand, since multiple users can share one machine and get to their information. An example of the power of Cloud: This story was written in Google Docs.
© 2008 New York Times Syndicate. All rights reserved.
© 2008 ECT News Network. All rights reserved.
