ORLANDO, Fla. – When Trinity Tesler looks at a cloud, she sees a puff of information.
"You put your information up there. You can get it from home, from your office, from your friend's house," she says.
Tesler is talking about cloud computing, a new way of looking at an old thing: the Internet (the time has finally come when we can call the Internet an "old thing"). The cloud is not really a cloud (it doesn't hold moisture, doesn't cause thunder, isn't called stratus, cirrus, or nimbus); it is a metaphor for storage space and data that users can access from anywhere via the Internet.
If you use web-based email, like Gmail or Hotmail, you're already using the cloud because your inbox is not actually on your computer. The emails are stored in a remote data center. Many big companies, like banks, own their own data centers, so it's likely you're cloud computing without even knowing it.
Now the cloud is moving to a whole new level. Cloud-based laptops and other devices are coming to market with no storage capabilities. The work you do, the files you create, your videos and your songs will be saved to the cloud or, more accurately, a faraway server (data farms are popping up all around the globe). All your saved material will be there whenever you want it, wherever you are; you can access that material from any device that connects to the Internet. Software (i.e. Office 365) is now available with functions tailored for cloud-based services.
"It works great. I use it all the time," Tesler says.
That kind of enthusiasm does not surprise John Benkert, owner of CPR Tools, a data recovery and security firm. "It could get to the point where we don't have applications on our system, on our computers at our house. They are somewhere on a server farm, and although our data may be stored on our computers if we choose to do that, most likely it will be on the servers out on the farm somewhere," he says.
Tesler has so much faith in the cloud, she's getting rid of CDs and other storage devices."No more thumb drives, no more carrying things around," she says. "You just have to back up your stuff!"
Backing up "your stuff" may require saving your material to more than one place on the cloud, keeping hard copies in a safe place, or holding onto to those CDs and thumb drives a little while longer. While Tesler is confident in cloud storage, many consumers are not. Users are not exactly flocking to cloud-based services yet. Last year, Dropbox, a web-based file hosting service popular among techies, exposed users' accounts during a code update glitch. Anyone using a random string of characters as a password was able to access any account. That incident, as well as the general risk of hacking, raise questions about the overall safety of cloud computing.
The safety of cloud computing, Benkert says, depends on the server farms or data centers, places that are not fail-proof. "When it's on the server, you have firewalls, you have encryption, you have ways to protect the data," he explains. "But once it goes out of their control, then I would be concerned as a security expert."
The server farms are owned by private companies which are responsible for keeping them hacker-proof and for switching out servers regularly without leaving traces of your data exposed. Before you sign up for cloud-based service or use a cloud-based device, you should find out where and how your data will be stored.
You should also ask the service provider what it does with your data when old servers are replaced with new ones. Read the terms and conditions of any agreement. If you have any questions, get on the phone. Use the cloud metaphor. Ask if the service is weatherproof.