Cloudy on the Cloud? Experts Say Computing Tools Can Bring Clarity

The language around Internet technology is atmospheric, at least to me. To wit:

• I have an air card--a USB gadget that plugs into my laptop, allowing me to go online wherever I may be. It relies on the cellular telephone network.
• Ethernet connects us to the Internet. People used to employ the word ether to refer to the heavens. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary provides a number of definitions, including: "a medium that in the wave theory of light permeates all space and transmits transverse waves."
• Let's not forget cyberspace. Kind of old school, but you get my point.

Now we have cloud computing. You might have first heard this term quite recently, thanks to a Microsoft advertising campaign featuring actors tackling vexing challenges by looking into the camera and saying, "To the cloud." Cisco also has a cloud campaign on television. Essentially, "Cloud with Confidence" assures potential customers that their data is safe with Cisco.

Jean Roberson is an executive for Appistry, a Creve Coeur company with the slogan, "Unlocking the Power of Cloud Computing." Appistry has a product called CloudIQ, which on its website describes as a platform that "applies cloud architectures to large-scale data storage and processing challenges."

Roberson explained what Appistry does in a email. "We help corporations 'cloud enable' their applications so that they can provide software as internal private clouds or provide their applications 'in the cloud' to end users," Roberson wrote. "In other words, we do not provide the application itself but the platform for cloud enabling the application."

Still mystified? Roberson said there are several ways to think about cloud computing. For the average consumer, she said, it is "software as a service." These are products many people already use, like Gmail, Google's office applications, and the products touted by Microsoft's "To the Cloud" campaign. 

"(These) are applications that are offered in 'the cloud' rather than having to have the software on your own computer," Roberson wrote.

An Interview in the Cloud

The skies begin to clear. For further elucidation, I contacted another local expert: The Strominator. 

David Strom is an author and blogger who writes on a wide range of Internet technology topics. He described his approach this way:

"I try to explain complex concepts simply to mostly IT managers and people that handle larger computer networks for businesses. I have been writing about the Internet since the early 1990s, when back then you could get a dot com domain in a matter of seconds for free by justing sending an email request to the right place. I tend to highlight products and services that work well and don't require a lot
of study to learn how to use them."

Here is our interview -- executed in the cloud, naturally.

Edgell: What exactly is "the cloud?" How does the average person get there, and
what will we find?

Strom: The cloud is anything that you can access across the Internet. Storage,
computers, websites, etc. Usually, you do this via a Web browser,
although you can write programs to do some of the work for you, or use
somebody else's.

The average person gets to the cloud every day that they are online:
Gmail for example. A Web server. Buying tickets, books, or whatnot on
an e-commerce site.

Edgell:  Many consumers already have arrived at the cloud and may not even know it. Can you track how and when "cloud computing" became part of our lives?

Strom: I think it is just a word that is gaining a lot more traction, certainly in the last couple of years. It is more a marketing term than anything else.

Edgell: Which cloud tools to you find most effective in your work and why?

Strom: I use Google's Gmail and Google Docs every day. They are free and easy
and powerful. Because they are cloud-based, I don't have to worry
about using any particular computer to get my email -- I can read
messages on my phone, an iPad, a laptop at home, or a borrowed laptop
at a hotel when I travel. Of course, to make this all work you need a
relatively fast Internet connection, but those are quite common these
days.

Edgell: If I print and keep my documents in a filing cabinet, I control what
happens to those documents and who sees them. Is there a dark side to the
cloud? What are some of pitfalls of relying on platforms that are controlled
by other entities?

Strom: Yes, you do give up some sense of security, but often this is more
perception than reality. If you have an insecure computer server, even
if it's on your own premises, (the folks at Epsilon are certainly the
most recent example), it can be taken advantage of. By using the cloud, you have to trust that the cloud vendors have taken care to use better locks on their doors, so to speak. Most of them have done so.

Edgell: What new cloud tools or new versions of current tools can consumers anticipate?

Strom: Expect to see tools that can incorporate your various social networks
and integrate them together to understand how they can be more potent.

For example, Flipboard produces a "newspaper" on iPads that is
based on articles recommended from your social network contacts.
Nimble can track conversations that you have with people whether
they are on Twitter or LinkedIn or Facebook. Backupify can make
backups of your cloud-based services like Facebook and Gmail in its
own cloud for further redundant protection.

The Strominator's Top Three Cloud Tools:

Google Mail (Gmail)
Wordpress.com blogging software
Wistia.com for video sharing (unlike You Tube, you can embed the video
player on your own website.)