Wednesday, September 16, 2009
The Year of the Cloud
2009 is truly shaping up as the Year of the Cloud. For me it's been the year when I've reached the inflection point where putting and accessing my data on someone else's infrastructure has become my primary, rather than a secondary usage scenario.
Although I'd dabbled, like millions of others, with Cloud-based services even before they were called cloud (hello, del.icio.us bookmarks, before the Yahoo! acquisition and more boring renaming as delicious.com; hi Skype, hey Flickr), it's only in 2009 that I've really started depending on these.
Two examples. Firstly, Mozy. After a couple of months of on-off 24x7 operation I've almost finished transferring around 55GB of JPEGs to Mozy Home. Why so long? The slow uplink from our domestic DSL. I've looked for upgrades but there's nothing affordable ... At this upload speed, it's not practical to try uploading the hundreds of GBs of lovingly-ripped and tagged music files, but it's a start in protecting my valuable documents and photos. I'm not planning to access my uploaded data on a regular basis, but knowing it's still there is reassuring.
Secondly, replacing Exchange with hosted email - by Google. This has given me first-hand exposure to how Google is moving into the enterprise as a serious software company. Although the migration has not been totally trouble-free, it's pretty impressive and most of all, the service is fast. My work mail is now powered by Gmail ... although the interface to Google Apps Premier Edition lacks many of the cool experimental Gmail features, I've got all the tools I need.
What next? Well, Roboform offers to sync all my website logins ... not sure this is a good thing. My mobile phone address book was synced via ZYB until Vodafone bought it and took the service offline (boo hiss). I've just checked and it seems to be back ... hey, wouldn't it have been a great idea to actually NOTIFY existing users? However, looking around, they don't support BlackBerry. Oh, forget it. ZYB was a bad example. There are probably a few wannabe copycat services by now, and I'm off to investigate.
Although I'd dabbled, like millions of others, with Cloud-based services even before they were called cloud (hello, del.icio.us bookmarks, before the Yahoo! acquisition and more boring renaming as delicious.com; hi Skype, hey Flickr), it's only in 2009 that I've really started depending on these.
Two examples. Firstly, Mozy. After a couple of months of on-off 24x7 operation I've almost finished transferring around 55GB of JPEGs to Mozy Home. Why so long? The slow uplink from our domestic DSL. I've looked for upgrades but there's nothing affordable ... At this upload speed, it's not practical to try uploading the hundreds of GBs of lovingly-ripped and tagged music files, but it's a start in protecting my valuable documents and photos. I'm not planning to access my uploaded data on a regular basis, but knowing it's still there is reassuring.
Secondly, replacing Exchange with hosted email - by Google. This has given me first-hand exposure to how Google is moving into the enterprise as a serious software company. Although the migration has not been totally trouble-free, it's pretty impressive and most of all, the service is fast. My work mail is now powered by Gmail ... although the interface to Google Apps Premier Edition lacks many of the cool experimental Gmail features, I've got all the tools I need.
What next? Well, Roboform offers to sync all my website logins ... not sure this is a good thing. My mobile phone address book was synced via ZYB until Vodafone bought it and took the service offline (boo hiss). I've just checked and it seems to be back ... hey, wouldn't it have been a great idea to actually NOTIFY existing users? However, looking around, they don't support BlackBerry. Oh, forget it. ZYB was a bad example. There are probably a few wannabe copycat services by now, and I'm off to investigate.
# posted by Nesjo : 11:43
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