The Cloud: A necessity, accommodation or future strain?

The web is enabling the birth of new technologies, and one that is quickly gaining popularity is cloud computing. One such example is companies who provide data storage to individuals or organizations on their servers in order to create new sources of revenue.

While the idea of not being responsible when your hard drive fails causing you to lose precious family photos or your favorite collection of music is nice, but at what price. Take note that the wallet size of your average Joe might not be large enough to afford this luxury.

Increased bandwidth requirements (i.e. a bigger and more expensive plan with your ISP) or additional infrastructure investments, may prohibit you from taking advantage of this new technology currently in vogue. Who will be the winner?

There are more questions to be asked: What is the access time? What if there is power failure? Can someone sniff my connection? Darn, what is my password again? And the list can go on and on.

Of course the idea of having all of your data stored on a remote server and accessible all of the time seems like a great idea. But what happens if a malicious intruder discovers the password to your account? You might say that it can happen right now with a traditional setup, but you are still in control, you can shut off the access (computer, router, modem!).

And once you put your data on the cloud, does it still technically belong to you? You’re storing data on someone else’s server, and there is a fine line between what qualifies as your property rights and theirs? What if you decide to migrate that data to a new ‘provider’ one day?

Do you trust others to manage and properly handle your personal data? How much are you willing to pay for it?

What if a power outage occurs and you cannot access your data, or even worse, a group of hackers attacks the servers (let’s think of Sony) and suddenly has access to all of your personal data?

How do you see this technology in the future? What are your thoughts regarding the future of remote data storage? For me one thing is clear! there are still too many questions to be answered before I take the plunge.