Thread: Should the cloud replace local apps and storage?

Joe - I've not seen the commercial, but there are those in the world who will take advantage of the people who do not understand the capabilities and limitations of technology. Personally I don't mind buzz words - often they are a handy shortcut, as in this case.

DuKane - I don't know what kind of laptop you had, but one that would not work at all without connection to the Internet is one I would not want to have. As I say, I've not found any online applications as good as the ones that are in my machines. If you needed to collaborate closely with a widely separated group in developing a project you would understand the advantage of online storage and retrieval. Such a system makes life a lot easier.

Originally Posted by garza

Personally I don't mind buzz words - often they are a handy shortcut, as in this case.

You might mind them if you were in work environments where they are overused by people who wedge them into conversations just to try and show they're in the know -- where they are misused or don't apply. It gets old fast.

That I can see. As with all words, they have their place, but when wrongly or overly used can be a nuisance. Fortunately the fishermen and cañeros in the village know only the meteorological definition of cloud.

There's some misconceptions about what Cloud computing involves, mostly generated by the advertisers you've mentioned trying to capitalize on the buzziness of the word to generate some sales.

I'll roughly (and briefly) toss out some ideas of what I think are true applications of cloud computing:
- Sharing a piece of hardware (server) with several distributed groups, allowing smaller entities access to more powerful computing through distributing the cost of communal hardware
- Sharing many pieces of hardware across a real or virtual wide area network, allowing distributed hardware access to each other's processing power to create a larger pool of processing capabilities
- Sharing online storage with several distributed groups to provide web-accessible storage with higher quality and more dilligent backup capabilities. This is an offshoot of the first point, but data storage deserves its own specific message due to its importance and popularity

Collaboration has been mentioned, and while I think it's an important use of the Internet I don't think it falls directly into what uniquely defines "cloud computing." The cloud deals moer specifically with communally pooling hardware and applications, while collaboration is more of an activity you would perform using those pooled resources.