What are your plans for Cloud computing?

[allanhitch]

I'm just curious.

Being here in New Hampshire USA, the other IT folks I talk to have a fairly consistent set of opinions and implementations (with a few exceptions, of course). Yet, when I speak to someone doing IT in Boston, or New York (city), the answers tend to have a very different set of views, and even when they are similar, they come in a radically different ratio.

So, please understand that I'm not trying to start a flame-war, but I'm genuinely interested in hearing (or in this case, reading) some other opinions. (...and, if I'm not careful, I might even learn something!)
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How will you be handling cloud computing? How will you be advising your clients or your company to utilize it?

If you're a home-user, what are your plans for the cloud resources available now, and those that will be available in the future?

What kind of environment are you, your clients, or your company currently in, and what kinds of connections to "the cloud" are available to you?

Thanks.

-Al

[Dangermouse]

If you're a home-user, what are your plans for the cloud resources available now, and those that will be available in the future?

I cant see any advantage or use for someone like me at home running linux, but id love to hear a reason

[meine]

my plans for the cloud are to avoid it.

professionally I advice my employer and colleagues to do the same. the reasons are the same both private and professional:
the cloud is not secure and availiability is not guaranteed. no one knows exactly who is behind the service and with what intentions. finally cloud computing needs internet connection per se and costs bandwith. the cloud is mostly because we can, not because we need.

at work (national highway agency NL) we have a company wide network with storing facilities etc called Virtual Project Room. it has storage, chat and planning facilities. but it looks old school and hardly anyone uses it whereas it provides cloudy features behind company firewall. IMHO services like dropbox, googledocs or prezi are not necessary, they add something new but nothing extra.

working together needs some straightforward editorial discipline -- everybody writes their own chapter and the editor compiles. it is counterproductive to write one sentence with several colleagues at the same time. maybe coding is different but also in that discipline I guess people do their own thing and put them together later.

at home I really don't know why I'd use cloud services. if I'd like my mum to see holiday pictures I take the car and visit her -- lucky Dutch small country ;). if I"d like to share some files I'd put them on my blog. cloud storage I don't need. every box in my house has plenty of storage inside. (anyone filled a terrabite disk with regular household stuff lately?)

meine

[billybob linux]

I may have misunderstood the whole concept of the cloud (please feel free to correct me) but as I understand it, you are in effect using resources provided (and controlled) by an outside organization.

Now, speaking from the viewpoint as a home user here, I just see no need to do that. The resources I have are adequate for my needs both in terms of storage and application availability and functionality.
I just see the cloud as a potential source of problems , for example security and availability, eg if the outside resource fails for some reason or other.

On the other hand a business user might see the benefits of sharing resources as a way of reducing costs but at the risk of loss of data or a security breach, either or both would not be good for business and might turn out to be more expensive to resolve than any savings made using the cloud.

Then again I might be way off with my argument and it would be interesting to hear what others, esp others that are better informed than myself think about it.

[ElderSnake]

I see no reason, as a home user, to not just make use of my ample hard drive space and keep all my data to myself.

The only real exception is uploading things I want to access remotely, as in anywhere, because I can't be bothered setting up my own sharing server

[sea]

I'd like to avoid clouding.
If i see an advantage of it, its just for sharing things, so as a another youtube/rapidshare/picasa and alike.

For anything else, i'd rather set up my own fileserver, or use rdp/ssh to access such files.
However, that would require another device, which is a question of resource (money).

[Dan]

What are your plans for Cloud computing?

Consignment unto the twisted evil demonic forces which spawned it.

Barring that ... avoidance behavior sounds like a pretty good plan.

[stevea]

Well you can buy time on a virtual system to play with it - but if you have a PC it's sort of pointless.
You can encrypt/compress all you data and ship it off to dropbox. It has some very nice synchronization capabilities..
But if you are like me - I do not trust anyone with my data. Even firefox sync isn't acceptable since I don't want people scanning my browser links.

I'm sure drop-box has good intentions - but no way do I use their SW for encryption. I've been involved in some business lawsuits over the years and with the patriot act my government can snoop on anyone with no warrant and no reason. (I recall the days when we had civil rights!). So it's best to keep the jerks away from data with a 2kbit key or better. Might not stop the NSA, but they aren't likely to take an interest either.

So long as I can get to my own server via ssh - I really don't see the point.

[Bazu135]

In certain instances, I'm sure cloud computing has its uses. I'm just not sure what those instances are, though.

The thing that I find most amusing is the scenario put forward by some security experts where they foresee a cloud with built-in security software so that home users no longer need antivirus products. Not such an issue for Linux users, I know, but that's not a scenario I felt like jumping in bed with back when I was using Windows!

As meine put it, cloud computing is something that we can do, not that we need to. Of course, those selling it would happily have you believe otherwise

[ElderSnake]

The thing that concerns me is modern desktop environments, Gnome 3 is a good example (if you've read some of the project leader comments etc) is that they almost really pushing or at least encouraging everyone to go with the Cloud. Especially with tablets and what not too.

I don't really get it, why is everyone being pushed towards and encouraged to adopt Cloud computing? Not everyone wants to put their data on some random server on a non-free service (thank goodness for freedom of choice!) so it just seems odd to me. But I guess that's the way we're going.

[allanhitch]

I just have to say that I find these posts fascinating...
I won't relate (just yet) the conversations I've had with others, or my own thoughts on the subject (again... just yet), but I do find the comments, thus far, fascinating...

[kona0197]

I'm a home user. The only things I keep on the cloud is my old Gmail and Hotmail messages. The rest stays offline stored on a backup external hard drive. Cloud computing is a bad idea.

[Wayne]

Was hardly using Dropbox at home so cancelled my account and removed their software from the four machines I have at home. With pen drives sitting on my desk it hardly seemed worth the bother. Can't really see the point from a home users' perspective...

[DBelton]

Here in the US, cloud computing is a bad idea for any home user.

1: You are putting your data up there for everybody to see
2: You are trusting your data to some other company. They could delete it all tonight.
3: It requires connectivity for you to be able to access your own data. If the internet goes down, you lose access.
4: And finally, with a lot of the US internet providers starting to cap bandwidth, it won't be long before you will have to pay to access your own data if it happens to go over your ISP's cap.

No thanks. Hard drives are cheap now, so if I need more space, I will just pick up another hard drive and put my stuff on it. It's more secure, and a lot faster to access.

But then again, I don't use Facebook, Myspace, or any of those other social networking sites, mainly because I know where the data goes once you put it up there.

[stevea]

Originally Posted by DBelton

Here in the US, cloud computing is a bad idea for any home user.
...

+1

OTOH there are some reasons to consider it for IT admin types.
I'm not the right guy to make the argument, but ...
You can prototype and test changes without disrupting your servers,
You can create fail-over severs ready to go in case of disaster.
I'm sure there are there reasons ....