Cloud based storage

Over the last 5 years f so there has been quite a bit of talk of "Cloud computing". Initially practical applications seemed a bit vague to me. You could do "stuff" in the cloud instead of on your local device. This implication was that at least one aspect of this service was to outsource the CPU load. Web based spreadsheets and word processors were also offered but are just not as responsive as the local version. Cloud web service resources are offered from providers such as google - but there are not that many commercial adopters of this service.

But now I am seeing a big uptake in cloud computing, not for the generic processing, but for the central data storage. This is going mainstream, millions of people are starting to entrust what once was personally managed data locally to the Internet.

Last year I made the (what I thought at the time) big step of entrusting all of my mail archive to Google. It was a great move and I have not looked back. I could work on a cached copy of my mail with my PC client, or my phone. Filing and reading it from anywhere, gone was the preview on one device but filing and archiving on another.

Earlier this month I got sick of partially loosing some of my contact information from my mobile phone as I reset it yet again. So I made the step of putting my contacts in google too. Now I sync them with my phone and my outlook at work. No problems and I haven't looked back.

With the trend emerging, I have now made another step adding "Evernote" to my list of cloud based storage. I have a copy of the client on my phone and on all the PCs that I use. Now I have notes happily replicated everywhere. I am even now starting to eye up "Dropbox" a personal file storage utility of the same elk. My copy has been dormant from use since the last time I could only transfer a file via the Internet for a server I was needing to work on.

I think it would be a good time to be in the online backup storage business. I think it is going to boom.