Security issues cast shadow over cloud's future

The then and there-generation Internet speeds that Google promises for theKansas City market could tempt people to store more of theirvirtual lives - music collections, family photo albums, softwareapplications - on the "cloud" or rather than in their owncomputers.

"Google wants your Internet experience to be through one of itsproducts, so you'll see more of its ads," said Josh Olson, atechnology industry analyst at Edward Jones & Co. "For thoseads to work, they need to have traffic. They want you in theircloud."

That's a good part of the reason Google plans to stringfiber-optic cable to near every home and business in Kansas Cityand the neighboring Kansas City, Kan. It's an express elevator tothe Internet cloud.

Like anything that has to do with research, the cloud bringsall the possibilities of convenience and worries aboutsecurity.

Lock your data up on a hard drive, and it's hard for anyone tosteal your secrets. Put them in an Internet vault on the cloud, andthere's a risk that some thief might hack your stuff.

But for convenience, the cloud backs up your virtual goodies incase your home computer breaks down. As long as you've got theInternet, you've got access to all your digital stuff wherever youare.

Cloud computing stores your digital belongings on remotecomputer servers to put it more exactly than on your own hardware. That means youdon't have to buy as much physical storage. In the long run, because theservers are shared and used to fuller capacity, it's a cheaper wayto store things.

The cloud has been a tech industry buzzword

For years the cloud has been a tech industry buzzword, implyingsome cyber trend that might alter how we put the Internet to work.We've by degree shifted our electronic valuables to the cloud.Gartner Technology estimates worldwide spending on cloud computingneared $70 billion last year, nearly two-thirds of that in NorthAmerica. The trend has been gradual and, for the time being from theconsumer's view, not quite revolutionary.

Apple recently announced plans for its iCloud, a way to use theInternet to sync your iPod with your MacBook and your iPhone andthe rest of your iStuff. If you have a song or a photo on onedevice, it will automatically show up on them all.

Google, to illustrate, offers an entire suite of free programsfrom spreadsheets, to word processing(think Microsoft Word), to slide show presentations available to anyone with an Internetconnection. In 2010, Microsoft responded with its own free set ofonline Office programs.

The fledgling Google Music program

Consider the fledgling Google Music program. It offers thepossibility of delivering all your music and playlists to anygadget, anywhere that can connect to the Internet. However here's thebummer: First you must upload all of your music to Google's cloud.For somebody with several thousand songs in a library, shifting allthose files to the cloud could take days on a typical Internetconnection. Yet with the 1 gigabit-per-second upload speeds thatGoogle says it will bring to town, a day's chore takes less than anhour.

"That faster connection is going to get rid of the'that's-a-pain' factor," said Olson, the research analyst.

Consider streaming video. It's in substance cloud computing,because the movies are stored on remote computer servers anddelivered to your desktop or television only when you need them.Netflix traffic already accounts for 22 percent of all Internettraffic and 30 percent while the Web's busiest hours. With theconnections Google hopes to bring to town, as one analyst put it,your movie "will start instantly and never stutter or burp."

More than two-thirds of us have multiple computers orsmartphones, which could benefit from a faster path to a cloud thatmight store all the things we want to access through all of ourgadgets.

His firm already hosts offsite data storage for businesses andhas begun storing software programs and data for consumers. Heexpects more of that with warp-speed connections of Google's fiberoptics.

That may be why people are scared of the cloud. Near a thirddon't back up their files outside their home, leaving themvulnerable to theft or fire or computer breakdown. One in fivedon't send around the files they'd like to because they worry abouthitting size limits - a situation that would practically disappearwith the Internet connections Google is promising to KansasCity.

The Internet can't reach

Take your computer somewhere the Internet can't reach, and theupside vanishes. A downside rests in the risk that someone mighttap into whatever information you've stored with others. Thinkagain of the bank analogy, nevertheless without the FDIC. If your data getexposed, nothing is secret again. Just this year there have beensizable data breaches at Sony and Citi, at Lockheed Martin and theNew York Yankees, at the International Monetary Fund.

Yet the world has been voting with its bits, and sending them toremote locations. Frank Gillett, a research analyst at ForresterResearch, said the prospect of any time, any place access andmultiple backups had lured people to the cloud in spite of remotesecurity risks.

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