When i met Vodafone at Cebit this year they were recording video response to the question ‘What’s The Cloud for you?’ I repeated a statement that I’ve made on the podcast a few times now – The Cloud isn’t mobile.
There are few places in the world where you can rely on the connection between you and the Cloud to be stable and fast. In most parts of the world the Cloud is either unstable, slow or very expensive. You can’t build any sort of quality process on something that could disappear at any moment.
As part of a strategy, the Cloud has its uses. I tend to use the Cloud for most of my storage and some of my apps from my desktop but when I’m mobile (and this is the key point here) I have to be able to deal with a cloud that may not be available. Sometimes, I just can’t work and that’s what I experienced at CES in Las Vegas. For me, someone who only does business over the internet, when the connection to the Cloud is gone, so is my connection to my customers. All I can do is carry on caching content locally, using local copies of cloud content and make efforts to get a connection through some other method. I also carry tools that can make the best of a low-bandwidth connection. Opera Mini and Twitter are two of the best tools for connecting over a low bandwidth connection. Text-only blogging, highly compressed video and images are two methods I fall back on too.
Have a think about processes you use to get things done. They may work via the Cloud via the desktop but would they work on a flaky, expensive low-bandwidth connection? Web apps and web storage are great ideas but when moving, they may not be there. You may already have a mobile cloud strategy that includes sync, backup connectivity or local apps. If so, let us know in the comments.
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Should Mobile Users Consider the Cloud?: When i met Vodafone at Cebit this year they were… http://goo.gl/fb/IvdNF
RT @umpcportal: Should Mobile Users Consider the Cloud? http://bit.ly/lc2uHZ < The hype around Chrome OS worries me.
Should Mobile Users Consider the Cloud?: When i met Vodafone at Cebit this year they were… http://goo.gl/fb/zEcpJ
RT @umpcportal Should Mobile Users Consider the Cloud? http://www.umpcportal.com/?p=23710
Chippy is very right and should be applauded for knowing about the issues, caring about the issues, and continuing to do something about it by not hiding his insight under a bushel.
Mobile should mean independent. Independent should mean self-reliant. The cloud is the opposite of this. The cloud is not mobile. The cloud is not productive. The cloud is not reliable. The cloud is usually not necessary if you’re buying the right device and using it correctly. Client-server paradigm is sometimes a feature but usually a bug.
At its best, “the cloud†is there to subsidize client-side deficiencies with server-side competence. For example, Opera Mobile does a nice job of providing a web browser like experience to even the most basic and underpowered of devices by leveraging a powerful back-end run by Opera. As another example, a device which just doesn’t have that much storage available to it might have to rely on the cloud to provide off-device storage. Of course, there’s a huge point of failure. If your service becomes unavailable or out of reach then your device becomes garbage. It’s best to avoid these devices altogether, but if you just can’t then the cloud can bail you out (just don’t rely on it).
Of course, you shouldn’t buy devices that can’t handle what you expect to do with them, and if your device is capable of doing what you need to do then you shouldn’t be involving the cloud. At its worst, “the cloud†is there to interfere with the competence of a device. Doesn’t your device already have a movie player installed on it? Then why are you downloading one from Youtube (via flash embedding) every time you watch a movie? Can’t your device already write documents? Then why are you logging on to Google Documents and downloading all of the javascript infrastructure just to write one?
I completely agree.
Recently I tried to move to cloud as completely as I could. My backup service as a web interface, as does my note taking service and my ToDo list service.
Every service also granted me Android apps, which synced the whole content offline on my device. At this point everything still worked fine.
Then my Android phone broke. OK, I still have my Galaxy Tab, but as a phone it is a bit – well – too large. I was offered a cheap Palm Pre Plus and I thought, I’d give WebOS a try.
Have to say, I pretty much like it. By far the best phone OS I’ve ever used (have yet to try Blackberry OS, Bada, and WP7).
But Evernote – my note taking service – is only available online. Yes, I can still write notes when offline, and can read all opened notes while offline, but forget opening notes when offline.
Many of you will now probably think it’s no big deal. Well, except for two instances when I had no connectivity indoors (one was a supermarket that is build inside an old WW2 bunker, the other instance was at my university). It was no big deal, I just had to remember what I wrote in my shopping list. Point missed.
But then my provider informed me that I had reached my data cap for this month and have to live with GPRS speed for a week. And now I’m in the world of server timeouts.
But that’s only my phone. The same contract includes my MiFi, so no decent mobile connectivity for my netbook as well.
Would I completely rely on cloud services as planned – and I’m glad that my studies require a full fledged word processor – I would be in deep *bleep*.
So for me the cloud is a great place for offsite backups and to sync content between several devices. As a work environment it has proven too unreliable in the last week.
Now you might argue that the same is true with my netbook. If it’s hardware is defective my work is hindered, too. And because that is true, I still keep the newest working predecessors of my essential devices (i.e. PC, phone).
As soon as we have the infrastructure to support that every device is connected at all times everywhere to the web at acceptable fees we are able to rely on the cloud totally. Up until then I’d not trust any cloud service to grant me access to my information at the time I need access to it.
Should Mobile Users Consider the Cloud? http://bit.ly/izlWBa
An issue never raised is that unless your Cloud provider allows *you* to encrypt with your own password and crypto method, you’re open to foul play from snooping governments. In America, the gov’t needn’t serve *you* with a search warrant to see what you’ve got socked away — only your Cloud provider, who is then under no legal requirement to turn around and inform *you*.
OK, but what are the requirements for this search warrant?
If the legal hurdles are high enough and respected by the agencies, then there should be no problem to the normal user.
For instance I have no fear that any German authorities break into my email account.
But you raise an interesting point which at least I have not viewed at, and that are the legal requirements of agencies getting at our data in the cloud. In a year this will become most important to me, and I should have adjusted my cloud usage accordingly by then. Thanks for this input!
Definitely some issues to consider! And yet, isn’t that (mobility) the “benefit” to the cloud – access anywhere to your stuff?
Yes, that is supposed to be the benefit.
But at the moment too many things stand in its way.
First there is the service availability. Take Sony’s PSN for example. Yes, it’s only games and movies, but currently I cannot download any of the games I have bought over time. I completely agree that this is no big deal at all, but given that the PSN also is my online movie service, my evening entertainment has been reduced to still acceptable levels. Yes, if it were a vital service, Sony could most likely bring the servers back online more quickly. But that would be at the cost of security.
And we can all argue how irresponsible Sony was, but I seriously doubt that Sony is the only cloud service fielding this kind of security.
Second we’ve got the data caps on data plans. If you hit these caps you either pay a lot more or surf at a drastically reduced speed. Depending on what cloud service you use, this means everything. Forget Youtube, forget Skype video calling (OK, this is not really cloud computing, I know), forget downloading huge chunks of data at all.
Oh, and before you start, forget any kind of activity that includes data transfers larger than your data cap, like restoring online backups.
Third you’ve got connectivity problems. Thick ‘stone’ walls, aluminium roller blinds, network crashes, blackouts, no GSM towers of your provider in that area, all these things can ruin your connection to the cloud services you just need at that moment.
Each of these three points apply equally to both public and private clouds.