"Work and Life with the Cloud” CeBIT 2011
"Work and Life with the Cloud” - The keynote theme for CeBIT 2011, is just a little unlucky that a couple of days before Google's GMail gave the doubters a little food for thought, but are is this really a fad that is doomed to failure?
Despite the Wikileaks/Twitter/US Government affair last year, it seems that the industry is still strongly backing the "cloud" as our future storage and computing powerhouse. People are quick to point out that this is dangerous (I even believe so myself)...
Being a fairly blind user of Twitter, I really don't have much to say, but I do share links that I find interesting - if only for future reference. It was therefore a bit of a shock when I saw the request for account information from the US Justice Department... all of a sudden I felt like that little boy, sat in class when someone has broken wind, I didn't do anything... but what if someone thinks I did? I knew instantly that I was not a user with any affiliation to Wikileaks... but many of my friends enjoy digging through the underground technical political scene and Wikileaks was the least underground thing that was! Also, what if I did take an interest in this? It all felt wrong and made me wonder why I use these services...
A couple of months later and Gmail fails, albeit for a relatively small number of users... and Facebook Clickjacking is on the rise... what should we think?
Well I am tempted to say I would ditch the cloud, but instead I chose the enormous flexibility that it gives me and I take a common sense approach - Yes, I use all the services mentioned and find each one more or less useful, but as I get older I find less reason to put everything in the cloud and also if they do go in the cloud, I make sure I know the risks. For example; Facebook will never get friends phone numbers from me, nor my photos! Twitter doesn't need to know every detail about my life, my location, mood or other. And Google doesn't need to hold all of my documents - though they do cater for the skeptics a little more.
Why would everyone ditch these services?
Without any viable alternatives on the horizon, I don't see myself changing my ways and more importantly, why would anyone else... Most people are completely unaware of these potential problems. This is also a reason why people will continue to over-trust the cloud and why there will not be any alternatives - for a while at least, as most startup ideas are trying to solve a problem.
One reason, people may perceive cloud computing as a problem, could be if it becomes a political debate, but at the moment there only seems to be one side to the debate. Cloud computing is seen as one of the big areas of growth for debt ridden governments... so watch this space ;)