Millwood Online

In the last few years “Cloud Computing” has become the buzz word on the Internet, and everyone is offering “Cloud Services”. But what is “The Cloud” and are we putting too much faith in it?

According to Wikipedia, “Cloud computing is a way of computing, via the Internet, that broadly shares computer resources instead of using software or storage on a local PC”

This means that if you...
Store photos on Flickr
Store Photos on Facebook
Store videos on YouTube
Store videos on Vimeo
Store bookmarks on Delicious
... you are using cloud services to store your media and your data. There are also cloud services such as Spotify and Last.fm that allow you to consume media without even owning the data, it is just streamed from the cloud.

Ten years ago when digital multimedia started to become the norm we slowly moved from storing music on CDs, storing photos on paper and storing home movies on tape to digital formats. MP3s sales are now over taking CD sales, digital camera sales have almost wiped out the film camera, and home video cameras (as well as professional ones) shoot in multiple digital formats.

With all this, new digital data services started appearing to allow us to store and share this data rather than clutter up our bursting hard drives. It was only 6 years ago when Flickr launched, and 5 years ago when YouTube launched allowing us to share our photos and videos with the world. With these services we could upload our photos and videos, decide who could see them and who couldn’t and if we ever needed this data we knew where it was, and it left room free on our hard drives.

But...
What if these services were down?
What if they closed?
What if they were bought by another company?
What if they were hacked?

Do we really know if our data is safe?

This morning I was directed to a link via @jaygreasley that @boagworld tweeted of an image @megpickard posted, on Flickr, obviously.

The image above shows all of the “Web 2.0” companies that have closed. Many of these would of offered a cloud service, and it’s interesting to see how many have failed, and if you had put your faith in them, your data would now be lost.

Although that is an interesting point, would your data be lost? Many people use these cloud services with the understanding that their data is not really that safe, and therefore keep a backup themselves. If you are wise enough your data would be stored safely in your home on a RAID system incase of hard drive failure. But, what if you have a house fire, your data is then lost. Well there are other other cloud services that will help you out there, and will let you backup files online, but we are then back to putting your faith in the cloud. Can we not win?

My solution would be to store data at home on a RAID system, back that up on a well respected cloud service such as Amazon’s S3, then use Flickr, Facebook, YouTube etc to share your data and not to store your data.

All this talk about cloud computing at I haven’t even touched on the idea of running your web site on a “Cloud Server” from web hosts such as Slicehost, VPS net, Rackspace Cloud and Amazon EC2. Maybe next time.