Family tech: Cloud computing means access anywhere

We are all used to the concept of buying software at a store. You bring home a box of mostly air, a CD and a flimsy manual. You install the software on the PC, glance at the manual and off you go.

However, with many of us now having fast, reliable Internet connections, a new software model has emerged. The program doesn't run on your local PC, but instead on some company's server computer and you just access it from your machine.

It's called cloud computing, because your program and your data are off somewhere else, "in the clouds." If you are using a Web based e-mail program like Google's Gmail or Microsoft's Hotmail or Yahoo Mail, then you are already using a program in the cloud. Your online banking is a form of it. When you order a pizza from Pizza Hut, you are running an application on their server. Facebook, Myspace and Salesforce, are all cloud applications. Google has an extensive collection of services in the cloud, many free, some revenue-generating. IBM is running TV ads now for their cloud applications.

You could replace much of the functionality of Microsoft Office, Outlook, Photoshop and many of the programs you how buy with free online applications.

Cloud Computing has some amazing benefits, but also some concerns and risks. Some of the risks have been in the news lately.

The best thing about using a program in the cloud is it is available to you from any computer. You can access your personal e-mail from work as easily as you can your home computer.

Cloud computing is a wonderful safety feature. If your computer breaks, or is lost or stolen, you can still get your programs and data using another computer.

No matter what computer you use, the data is the latest. More and more we are accessing the Net from our phones. Enter an event into Google Calendar on your PC and pull it up on your cell phone. There is no need to synchronize data on different devices; the data is really on just one platform.

Another benefit is ease of implementation. To start using a cloud application, you just go to a Web site, create an account, arrange a payment method (if it isn't a free application), and start using the application. A home business can use the same tool to track their customers the big multi-nationals employ simply by going to Salesforce.com and creating an account and paying a small cost per user each month.

There are downsides, though. Since your data is on someone else's computer, bad things can happen not through any fault of your own. Users of Sidekick cell phones experienced this last week.

Danger, which provides services to the phone, experienced problems when a server error combined with an apparent faulty backup and restore ability led to all the phone's users fearing loss of all their data: contacts, to do list, calendar items.

As of Thursday, however, Microsoft (Danger's owner)announced, "We have recovered most, if not all, customer data." They went on to say, "We now believe that data loss affected a minority of Sidekick users."

Earlier in the week, it was looking like 100 percent of the users had lost 100 percent of their data, so this is great news. Nevertheless, the fear will long be remembered. The situation is a massive public relations problem for Microsoft/Danger specifically, and cloud computing as a concept.

Whether your data is in the cloud, or on your PC, it is only a matter of time until something messes it up. Your laptop can be stolen or have hard drives die. Most of us do not backup, or if we do backup, we don't test our restore abilities until we need them.

There are ways to protect ourselves and our data whether it is in the cloud or our home. We'll cover that in a future column.

Don't shy away from cloud computing because of the danger. The benefits are too great to ignore. Do keep in mind your data may one day go away, and be ready to deal with it by having copies of critical data on your home PC as well as in the cloud. Programs like Google Documents let you download your documents to local files. Forward important e-mails from one account to another so you have two copies. Find out if your application has an export capability, and if it does, export your data to your home PC regularly.

Links for items mentioned in this column can be found at: http://bit.ly/FamilyTech Mark's blog is at http://markstout.blogspot.com and his email address is markstout@gmail.com