There are many ‘clouds’ out there, Yahoo, BT (though why anyone would entrust their data to BT is a mystery to me), hosted mail exchanges, photo sharing sites…. the list is endless. Our cloud of choice is Google, mainly because we were used to the way it looked, we could link our email and most importantly the analytics packages for our customers.Â
The cloud has been in existence for many moons now but it seems recently that more and more people are using it as part of their daily lives, we certainly do. So what are the advantages? Well for us we can log the work we do on customer’s websites or marketing campaigns and link their Google account to it and they can see exactly what we have done and when we have done it. That means the customer is happy, we have a record of work undertaken and the best thing yet is that it is stored in the cloud and so isnt taking up space on our laptops – perfect!Â
Or is it perfect? This morning I was reading a blog post by Rory Cellan-Jones on the BBC dot.life forums all about the failings of the cloud, actually that makes it sound all very doom and gloom, its not as bad as that. But it does give pause for thought. What happens if the servers that our clouds are sitting on break down? This is exactly what happened to one server now owned by Microsoft and it looks like some people have lost valuable data. So what is the answer? Well I think it is simple…. age old saying ‘dont put all your eggs in one basket’ comes to mind. But actually I think it is simpler than that. If your business would be in complete melt down if your data was lost within the cloud, then you clearly need it saved somewhere else as well. Does this mean we carry on using our external hard drives and dvd’s? Possibly, although I hope not as my quest for a paperless and cumbersome gadget free office still exists!
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