2012 In The Cloud
Posted: Friday 06 January, 2012
Colin Miller
The idea of storing files in the cloud may be slightly disconcerting to many people who would rightly ask questions such as, where are my files actually going? What kind of security is protecting my files? What benefits are there for me? All of these are valid questions and concerns, as to many users, cloud computing is a relative unknown, however, now that a number of global organisations and companies are adopting and offering cloud based services, 2012 could be the year that the cloud goes mainstream.
Companies such as Google, Apple and Amazon are all now offering cloud-based services for music, files and information. Google’s latest contribution to cloud services (although currently only to users in the US) recently came out of beta and was offered to users as ‘Google Music’. Google’s service allows users to upload and access up to 20,000 of their songs to the cloud to be accessed by any Android device that they have registered to their account. Apple’s offering comes in the form of iCloud, which provides users with a number of free and paid services to store images, documents apps, contacts and music. Amazon offers a more modest service that is inline with the likes of Dropbox by offering 5GB of free cloud based storage to users for their files and backups.
All of these services will bring cloud-based storage to a much broader audience, due, in part to the reputations and reach of the companies offering them. Users will be much more likely to trust a service that is being offered by a large company such as Amazon or Google, especially since the procedures needed to sync information to the cloud via these services requires little technical knowledge or skill. This likely means that 2012 will see a dramatic increase in cloud based services and adoption, the next problem that will likely arise for users may not be worrying about what the cloud is or how it works, but instead which service out of the numerous options to choose?
Cloud-based services are still their infancy as far as the general public is concerned, however, now that big name companies and brands are pushing their offerings for cloud storage, the transition to the average person becoming aware of what the cloud is and how it works will most likely be a swift one. 2012 is set to become the year of the cloud and it is unlikely that the way we store and manage our personal information and files will ever be the same again.
