If you believe that “the Cloud” is about having a personal storage space, used to backup your Computing data, you are wrong, and not by a little bit.
The Cloud is a lot more than DropBox, Google Drive, Mega, and other such services. From an importance and impact perspective, ‘the Cloud’ is one of the most significant human endeavors of the last century.
The “Cloud” is, at least, two modes of computing:
- Cloud Storage
- Cloud Computing
To help you understand the above terms in ‘layman’s terms’ here are definitions (both from Wikipedia).
Two key initiatives related to, and dependent upon, the Cloud include:
As for threats to personal privacy brought by firms such as Dropbox, Google, Amazon and the like, you certainly may worry and complain as much as you wish; but, the privacy & security war is long over. The cloud has been here for quite a long time (e.g.; I began working on cloud apps as long ago as 1980; although, they weren’t called that, in those days.) Now we enter the 2020’s, the ‘Cloud’ is well entrenched and growing exponentially. It is sad to say, security & privacy are things of the past.
Globally, the majority of people want the benefits of big, shared data, at any cost. This includes the desire to cure diseases; prevent disease contagion; advance medical science; address global climate issues; gain easier, quicker access to personal/ private information; explore space (outer and inner); improve human communications, etc. Society, in general, seems willing to sacrifice almost anything in order to address/ achieve these objectives.
The urgency and desire to achieve objectives, like those I just mentioned, are driving the charge for greater, more pervasive “Cloud Computing”-related activities. Those of us who might object to one or more aspects of “the cloud”, as it exists today, are overwhelmed by those who are certain these objectives are “the best for humanity”.
In 2019, it is safe to say, “Big Brother” is not just watching you (to paraphrase George Orwell); Big Brother “knows” you, intimately. You can see that the privacy (data sharing) war is lost because governments are trying to close the door, after this horse escaped. All their rules and regulations are “reactive in nature”; they are not in front of this “technology curve”. Regulations are playing “catch up ball”. Regulatory and control efforts, such as they are, are too little, and much too late.
So if what you are worried about is Cloud based servers for redundancy and backup, don’t. It’s all about Risk/ Reward. The cloud sites and services I have access to are inexpensive, reliable, and much better than the 5 USB drives I, also, backup to. Cloud Storage is superior due to its easy redundancy, remoteness, distribution, and nearly ‘universal’ accessibility. It is simply smart to use. Plus for many (most?), the data stored on a local computer drive has very little ‘actual value’, when compared to what is already “out in the cloud”.
The backup & storage cloud is simply not the aspect of the cloud to worry about. The “Cloud” that holds your thoughts, friends, money, aspirations, the essence of your very existence is the one where there is Risk.
Focus on what’s important.
To further define the breadth of the ‘public face’ of the cloud ‘storage & applications’ business, I recommend you read these articles:
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