I do not understand this cloud stuff. I just bought a new video editing program where 3 GB of cloud storage is included. I’m scratching my head, wondering just why would I let anyone have my personal videos, financial data, business workings, or whatever? Once someone else has it, you’ve lost physical ownership.
None of this would be secure once it leaves my own hard drive, which is seldom connected to the net.
I wonder the same thing all the time. Unless its a private cloud, where you (or your company) has physical control over if.
It’s all about convenience. If you store files on ‘the cloud’ (which is just a server someone else owns), you can access the files from anywhere you have internet. It’s pretty much the same as if you emailed the files to yourself, you can re-download them anywhere you want. Also, you don’t have to have your own large amounts of storage yourself.
However, I fail to see the point in it outside of work/sharing files with other people. I have no reason to put anything private or sensitive under someone else’s control. Not a good idea. I’ve heard stories about some cloud servers mentioning in their ToS that they have the right to your files and anything contained in them.
The Cloud as computation resource is another story. If you were the only one using the computing resources of the Cloud and the Cloud had access to 1,000,000 processors then you could theoretically solve whatever problem you're trying to solve in one-millionth the time.
However, if millions of people are accessing millions of processors on the Cloud, or billions of people are accessing billions of processors on the Cloud then everyone has access, on average, to just one processor and there is no real speed-up.
My fear with the Cloud is that every time you make a simple request for information it will send thousands of processors going off to collect, dissect, analyze, and categorize your request in order to figure out exactly what type of ad to send to your browser.
Right now the early adopters are making all sorts of claims of how they are able to access millions of processors and analyze weather data, etc. But what happens when millions of bots from ad companies, or the Russian mob, or millennials are using all that processing power to dissect your buying habits or predict stock trends or make fantasy football trades?
I'm thinking that with Gresham's Law, over time the largest portion of computing power accessible via the Cloud will be for frivolous or noxious reasons.