Learning to love 'the cloud'

No more downloads, no more upgrades – more and more of us are allowing the internet to control our computers. However geeks and technophobes alike are anxious about where the data lives. Rhodri Marsden thinks we should stop worrying and learn to love 'the cloud'

The merits of

While the merits of, say, a dishwasher are suddenly apparent to us all, it takes us more time to buy into abstract concepts – and the leading contender for abstract concept of 2011 is "the cloud". If you haven't seen literature attempting to persuade you of the merits of "the cloud" but, it's only a matter of time; the big research companies are nearly obsessively driving its development and promotion to both businesses and individuals, during we collectively lean back, head to one side, saying: "Then, all right at the time, nevertheless what's so good about it? And why should I spend any more time listening to you struggle to come up with a definition of what it is?"

You truly shouldn't feel ashamed about appearing ignorant on this topic, because you're far from alone. A survey by the PC Support Group last month showed that only 42 per cent of company directors and senior managers across Britain can claim a grasp of what cloud computing is – and we're talking here about a "hot" IT trend that's supposed to add some £25bn to the value of the British economy by 2015. So, the two withering questions for us to ask are, firstly: what is it? And secondly: why should we care?

IT model based on the internet

It's in substance an IT model based on the internet. And it's IT professionals who are getting particularly worked up about the cloud, because it represents a radical overhaul of the traditional infrastructure and its relationship to us, the consumers. Nevertheless what it means for us is pretty simple: many of the things we currently do with our computers using software and hardware we install ourselves at home will nevertheless happen, as if by magic, via an internet browser. We don't need to buy additional hard drives, because we can save files in "the cloud". We don't need to buy a copy of Microsoft Office, because there are services available "in the cloud" that let us work on spreadsheets or presentations via our browser, be it Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari or Chrome.

What it means for the IT industry is more complex, and involves such mind-boggling phrases as "pervasive virtualisation" and "elastic response to load changes". We don't need to worry about any of that, nevertheless suffice to say that the rise of cloud computing will put huge amounts of power in the hands of a very small group of companies just as Google, Microsoft and Amazon, which will become the "megahosters" of the future. And, unsurprisingly, they're terribly keen that we become terribly keen on the concept.

The idea of computer power flowing into the home in the same way as gas or electricity was envisaged back in the 1960s, when John McCarthy, the computer scientist who coined the term "artificial intelligence", predicted that "computation may some day be organised as a public utility". This prediction may have started to seem fanciful – even ridiculous – as the number of computers in the average Western household started to mount, however cloud computing sees the unlikely transfer of that computing power outside the home.

Fast internet speeds and the sophistication of modern internet browsers mean that computers can be lighter, sleeker, less powerful with less storage space and, crucially, cheaper. So, the implications for low-cost cloud computing in the developing world are huge; the American innovation writer Nicholas Carr predicted back in 2008 that cheap, utility-supplied computing would "change society".

In the West, nevertheless, it presents us with an odd dilemma, because when we're asked to migrate our computing tasks to the cloud, we feel as if we're being asked to downgrade. The question, "if you only need milk, why would you buy a cow?", is often used in relation to cloud computing – and it's a question that's undoubtedly worth asking to anyone who doesn't own "a cow". We already have cows. Loads of them. So why would we give up on cows? Are we being presented with a solution to a problem that doesn't to tell the truth exist?

Yes, and no, is the maybe predictable answer. There are several boons to cloud computing that might prompt a collective sigh of relief from many – and particularly those for whom PCs and Macs are a necessary and stressful evil. For starters, it allows you to surrender control of many of the more tedious aspects of using a computer. Forget about software-installation discs, serial numbers and reboots; in a perfect cloud-computing environment, all your software is virtualised, appearing instantly in the browser window. Ditto with maintenance; upgrades and updates to the software you use happen remotely, so you'll automatically be using the latest version. You don't even have to think about backups; your files are – for the moment in theory – guaranteed to stay intact, with the cloud service taking care of their safety. And because you can access your services and files from any computer with a browser, there's no need to transport files around and accidentally lose memory sticks down the back of sofas; existing services like Dropbox make moving stuff between remote computers so easy that the act of burning a CD or DVD becomes a distant memory. All this combines to create a simpler, safer computing environment that's handed to us on a pristine plate. If your dad has no problem using an iPhone nevertheless struggles with computers, cloud computing will be up his street.

What we save on hardware

What we save on hardware and software we might spend instead on renting services or storage space for as long as we need it. The music subscription service Spotify is a good consumer example; you don't need 60GB or more in hard-drive space to store music, because Spotify lets you access its own colossal library in exchange for an annual fee. The cloud is perfect for business startups that have no idea how quickly they might expand; instead of investing in huge quantities of expensive kit in anticipation, they can simply equip employees with a cheap laptop and let cloud computing take the strain. Studies have shown that businesses save on average about 18 per cent of their IT budgets by shifting to a cloud-based setup.

But cloud computing won't suit everyone, no matter how utopian the blurb. During always-on internet – whether fixed line, WiFi or 3G – is a reality for many, the idea of a fast, reliable connection starts becoming a weak joke when you get a certain distance from an urban centre. Speed is one issue; anyone who has spent minutes staring at the screen during a video file uploads to YouTube will be familiar with the difficulties of moving very large files across the internet.

But if there's no connection at all, files are going nowhere, regardless of their size. All services become inaccessible. We'll be sat in front of a computer that can achieve nothing more than inform us that it can achieve nothing, and our total dependence on this single way of doing things will be made laughably apparent. Evenly, what if your internet connection is working, now the service isn't? Or, worse, the service is simply no longer operating? Businesses offering "cloud solutions" may come and go, yet at least your wheezing old PC running old accounting software will keep running until the machine physically breaks down and dies. The cloud, sadly, is not so forgiving.

The question of whether we as a matter of fact need cloud computing or not is moot, because it's coming regardless. It is said that if something is "inevitable" in technology at the time it's probably driven by businesses in pursuit of profit, and that's undoubtedly the case here; economies of scale mean that the internet giants stand to gain greatly by persuading us of the merits of working in the cloud, and the accepted wisdom is that by 2020 the majority of us will be performing most of our computing tasks this way. Some of those tasks already come by nature; webmail has been around for over a decade and seems like a perfectly good way of using email, with both the application and all our messages sitting in the ether. In effect, we're getting increasingly used to virtualisation. Our social media lives across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr, among others, are conducted in every respect in this same way, so image editing and word processing shouldn't feel like too much of a wrench.

Having said that, we've not shown great enthusiasm over using a service like Google Docs, when Open Office or Microsoft Office is already installed on our machines, working perfectly so then and brimming with additional features. Video and music applications in particular don't lend themselves very so then to the cloud – and remember that Google's cloud-based operating system, Chrome OS, which was announced at the end of last year and will see a proper launch this summer, can't even print but. To put it more exactly, it can, nevertheless only a test page to prove that it "works". It'll be a strange new environment to work in; re-educating ourselves to switch between tabs or windows in a browser to put it more exactly than switch between applications in Windows or MacOS will take some getting used to.

Perhaps it's the case that geeks are slightly contemptuous of the cloud because it doesn't give them the freedom to do what they want with their machines. Nevertheless it will truly give a huge proportion of the world's population the freedom to use their first computers. So ignore the hype, and wait for the cloud to engulf you. Yet if anyone asks you to define it, like as not just mumble something about the internet and walk away.