The cloud, boss, the cloud!!

Not that this is necessarily a news flash, but with Apple making their “iCloud” announcement this week, the talk of cloud computing and storing all your files/music/video on the “cloud” has once again turned into a hot topic this week online.  Kind of amazing when you think about it, how Apple makes us suddenly care about things so quickly right?  That’s the power of a brand (see my previous blog post).

So the thought is that your laptop, iPhone, iPad, Android epad, or other wireless device will eventually just become a tool for downloading and processing data and information that exists on the “cloud”.  Why hold all of your MP3′s of your songs locally when you can have instant access to them anywhere, from any connected device?  Why save videos of your favorite music videos when you can have instant access to watching the whole movie online via Netflix?

Full disclosure time: being in the video production business, we can never have enough local storage space fast enough when it comes to our production work (Drobos, external hard drives, backup external hard drives off-site, Dropbox online backups just to name a few.)  Our local storage space need grows with every consecutive month, and we need instant local access quickly and efficiently.  “Cloud” computing within the world of video production is a LONG long ways off.

But here’s my problem about “cloud” computing that I can’t quite get over.  I can think of three different places I was at just this week where I couldn’t even get a wireless signal where you would most likely expect one to be.  More people are expecting “Free WiFi” wherever they go (Starbucks is free, finally!) but it just isn’t a reality.  Remember when every local city was going to spend all this money to make sure that every citizen had free wireless access no matter where you were located in any part of the city?  Yeah, that grand plan didn’t quite pan out when cities realized how much money they’d have to spend to create this widespread wireless coverage.  And to purchase a 3G/4G plan for your iPad can get really expensive really quickly.

I can also think of two local places where I was on the phone this week (using what is touted as a very reliable wireless carrier) and my signal totally dropped out.  And that was just a phone call.  Imagine if I’m trying to access my important data and I lose a “signal” and I don’t have that information backed up somewhere locally, what are my other options?

Don’t get me wrong, its great to have your resume, and important files and documents online that you can access from anywhere (look at the success of Google Docs and Dropbox), and also be able to share with others too.  But the US of A just doesn’t have the free wireless utopia that everyone thinks that we do (nor are we willing to pay that much for it either on a monthly basis).  So we’re kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place when it comes to what I feel will be the 2.0 of cloud computing.

We just might have to be content for now in listening to our music stored locally in the event of a “no wireless signal detected” emergency.

– Mike Madigan, Operations Manager, M-1 Studios / www.m-1studios.com