Two of my favorites inadvertent oxymora, they sum up and define where computing seems to be headed for. What is cloud computing? And what, if anything, does it have to do with the average Joe as a computer user? Read on.

The Cloud, as covered before, is of course referring to the Internet. Therefore, cloud computing refers to the model in which data is kept and software is run outside the physical location where the user and his computer are. Facilitated by the inter-connectivity provided by the Internet, this model is possible today and in fact, to some degree many users are already, well, using it. Examples of it are: Web-based email where the user logs on to a website to read and write emails, cloud-based malware detection like the Panda Security model where large servers are processing and classifying malware samples and supplying that information to the user’s computer, online backup services, just to name a few.

It seems like migration to cloud computing is going to continue at an increasingly faster rate. Google’s whole model for businesses is heavily dependent on it. Windows cloud based services (Azure), although a little late compared to Google,  is being developed, etc. The question is, is this beneficial or detrimental?

Covering in detail all the relevant data needed to make an adjudication would escape the scope of this brief article. However, 3 main elements are the main concern of those that tend to oppose the model: Privacy, security, availability (control).

Privacy and security concerns become obvious at a glance, when one considers the current day news on computer breaches such as hotmail servers being hacked and passwords stolen, the recent Epsilon security breach disaster, on and on.

When it comes to availability and control, the fundamental problem is, of course, that the individual or even a single company is not in control of the Internet, while factors like a cyber-security bill would give a president the power to flip an internet kill switch that would render cloud computing systems useless. Plus the remote computers the cloud computing system is based on are not necessarily under the normal user’s control either.

In summary, while the concept of the model is not detrimental per se, the above factors, if not handled, will probably corrupt the model and make it more a liability than an asset. In an utopic world, with no security or availability/control concerns, implementation of the model would probably be considered evolutionary.