You may have herd allot of people talking about the cloud or cloud computing. No there not talking about a computerized cloud there talking about the notion that everything we do now that we need software running on our local computers being a thing of the past. What will replace that well what elts the internet there are examples of this now even. about 5 or 6 years ago if you wanted to mange your money using your computer you would go to Wal-Mart or what ever store near you that sold computer software and buy Quicken then you would go home and install it. Well now if you want to mange your money with Quicken you go to the Quicken website and sign up for a free account with them and set it up with your bank. There is no downloading of any software on to your computer its all in your browser now. That is the idea of cloud computing. You no longer have to go to a store buy software and install it on your computer it is all on a server on the internet.
No this has caused some alarm there are people that are not that trust worthy of the internet. No matter how good your code is and no matter how secure you think you made your program there is always going to be a vulnerability in it. Lets face it when the internet was made there was no need for security it was just scientists sending data to each other and they knew each other so there was trust. But now there some many people on it that you don’t know who is who now. So back to example of Quicken if hacker wanted to they could hack your computer and see what you are doing or they could hack your bank and see it that way too. So it is not perfect yet it is as secure as they can make it cause of how it gets the information but there some variables that have to come into play. The security of your computer and the security of your banks network. But for most cloud computing applications its the security of your computer and the security of the site you are on. You can make sure you are secured but you never know about the site you are on. I guess I would say just use cloud applications from brands you know like Quicken and Adobe.
Cloud computing can save you money as well. Lets use Photo shop Express it is a simple photo editor that runs in the cloud. why should you go out buy Photo Shop CS4 or Photo Shop Elements when you will never use most of what they can do. Most people want to play with the color add some text maybe and crop some photos. Well you can sign up for photo shop express and you can do all that right from your browser now installing needed. Also Photo Shop is a RAM hog it uses lots of RAM and doesn't work right on older computers. Well as long as your computer can run Flash and your browser of choice then you can use photo shop now. You don’t have run out and buy more RAM for your computer and then open the case and put it in photo shop just works.
With cloud computing what operating system becomes less and less relevant. The question will be what browser are you using will become the new question. I do think the big players will be Google chrome and Mozilla Firefox. That will be the new Microsoft VS Apple but witch one will be witch. Out of the two Mozilla has a bigger market share but I do think that Google can catch up. Who knows what the future will have in store for us maybe cloud computing will not take off maybe it will be something different. For now companies are looking towards the cloud. Now you have to ask your self “Do I trust the cloud?
-Mike
