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There has been much hype and much said recently over the term ‘cloud computing’. It describes the way things tend to be moving in the IT world - that we connect to computer resources stored elsewhere than our own physical hardware. More and more of us are starting to dabble in this, whether it be through web servers hosting our websites, email hosting storing our email or word processing allowing us to update and share our documents. Google, Microsoft and Amazon are some of the main advocates of cloud computing and there has been an increasing push to make software available via the web. Cloud computing of course has its benefits (ease of access being one of them) but we are left to wonder whether it is everything it’s made out to be….is cloud computing the one that will be going up in smoke?

According to the Guardian, Richard Stallman, creator of the computer operating system GNU, said that “cloud computing was simply a trap aimed at forcing more people to buy into locked, proprietary systems that would cost them more and more over time.” He may have a point - more and more people are storing pictures on sites such as Flickr and Facebook, managing emails via Gmail and Yahoo and storing documents on on such sites as Google Docs and Zoho. Of course, the benefit is that it is arguably much safer (no longer will the stolen laptop be prone to misuse) but we are left in the mercy of companies such as Google, Microsoft and Amazon to manage our computing habits.

Unfortunately not always are such companies up to the challenge shown by the recent outage of Gmail in February 2009 - somehwhere between 2.5 and 4 hours depending on who you listen to and the fact that this was the sixth significant drop time in the space of eight months. Not only would have this had had individual implications but for companies making use of cloud computing (and Google in particular is encouraging companies to make use of Google facilities, in particular through Google Apps), financial implications.

Equally, what happens when you can’t access your email account either through having your account hacked or other mistakes which have their own implications. There have been many high profile stories of this - Governor Sarah Palin’s Yahoo account hacked and Jack Straw’s Hotmail account also compromised. However, I’m sure that the high profile ones aren’t the only areas where this happens (speaking from personal experience of losing access to an old Hotmail account).

Of course the Gmail outage in February 2009 and hacked email accounts online are only a drop in the ocean but it does perhaps offer a small insight into what could one day be. What it does it to emphasise the need to backup information offline and have someone at the end of the phone when systems fail… suggesting perhaps that it might not be as simple to fully move to cloud computing as Google, Microsoft and Amazon would have us think.

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Software, Technology Amazon, Cloud Computing, Gmail, Google, Microsoft