Do you think the future belongs to the ‘Cloud’ ?

I lost my trust in the ‘Network’ when my sites were wiped out in the VAServe LTD incident. Cloud to the rescue! But some how, the promise of redundancy and high availability of the ‘Cloud’ doesn’t do the trick for me.

I see everybody mentioning the ‘Cloud’, how easy is to deploy everything, how easy is to maintain, or how easy is to have all your documents in one location, available from everywhere, backed up, etc.

On the other hand, I know that people are very individualistic. Given the chance, they move out of the campuses and buy a house. Given the chance, they will stop going to the Post Office to make phone calls by installing one at home. People need control over the stuff they use do every day. Of course, there are exceptions, people have to go to Hospital when they have problems, but still keep a small pharmacy in house, just in case.

Your online space (either public or not) is rented to you (get access if paying) and is not private property.

Hence, if I apply the same independence metaphor to the ‘Cloud’, I believe that given advancements in storage hardware (fast, reliable, cheap) coupled with high speed LAN and WAN networks – everybody will start to use their own hosted small clouds, in house, and not shared with thousands.

Right now the ‘Cloud’ solves some problems that you face when dealing with day to day issues:

• hardware is difficult to maintain and is costly both due to time and money (paperwork / approvals / money / contracts).
• software is not easy to maintain (bugs, security vulnerabilities, administrators, trained personnel)
• spam is hard to fight against

Thus, I applaud the monster feat that the ‘Cloud’ companies created / manage. However, I feel that given the right circumstances people will choose to have their online profile as a private property than shared in the ‘Cloud’. This didn’t happen for electricity (still far more cheaper to buy electricity than to operate your own generator). But related to hardware, people already did the switch from mainframes to personal computers once.

The cycle starts again.