Heads in the Cloud - Computing in the Digital Age

Yesterday Amazon launched its cloud storage service know as Cloud Drive.  Ever since seeing the announcement on their webpage users around the world have been scratching their heads and saying "what the heck is 'cloud storage'?  What is a cloud?  Where is it? How do I use it?  Is it safe?"  Today I'm going to do my best to answer a few of those questions.

Every morning around the globe people wake up, get out of bed, and flip on a light switch.  The vast majority of them have no idea how the electricity is generated or transported to their house; they just know it works.  So it is with cloud computing.  A user can pull up an application on the internet, use it, and never have to install or run it on their own home computer system.  That in a nutshell, is what cloud computing is.

Contrary to what you might think, the idea of cloud computing is not new.  It was first theorized in the 1966 book The Challenge of the Computer Utility by Douglas Parkhill.  Almost all of the aspects of cloud computing that we use today came from that book, including the electric utility metaphor used earlier in this post. Businesses today utilize cloud computing for its agility, cost effectiveness, reliability and scalability.  Individual users are becoming aware of cloud computing technology mostly as it relates to cloud storage.  With digital collections of movies, photos, and especially music growing at an extremely rapid rate, users are looking for ways to store their collections without taking up valuable hard drive resources.  Additionally, cloud storage has the added bonus of being able to be accessed from any computer - you don't have to be at home.

The biggest question involving cloud computing and storage is undeniably safety.  With access occurring virtually, how can you be sure that it is safe?  Simply put, the companies providing these services have the greatest incentive to provide the absolute best in information security out there, because if people don't believe the service is safe, they won't use it.  No more business.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.  Will you be using Amazon's new cloud drive?  What cloud storage do you already use (hint: have a flickr or photobucket account? Post videos on youtube? Share photos on Facebook?  That's cloud storage, even if you didn't know it)?  Did you realize that's what it was before reading this post?