Home – New › Forums › Tech talk › The Cloud is great, but… › Reply To: The Cloud is great, but…
I have never read this hype of the cloud solving all of the world’s computer ills. Where is it hyped like this?
I just want to store it on a network drive that can be accessed locally and by everyone.
Which is fine if you have everyone sitting in one office working together. But becoming rarer these days. People are mobile, working from multiple locations. Storing on a local server is no quicker than in the cloud if you are not in that location.
Even for people sitting in the same office local server storage is a crap solution – expensive, power hungry, needing maintenance and updating regularly.
If I worked in an office with 4 other people I would still store everything in the cloud. Given I have the information locally also then I can share that information in public folders via wi-fi through local machines. For all but the biggest files there just seems no reason to have bulky, power hungry, expensive servers sitting in anything but a few environments.
Network drives are yesterdays technology. It is only a matter of time before wireless information is almost as quick as ethernet and for 99% of files in 99% of places there is just no need for local storage – if you are set up correctly.
In my original post I said that the cloud has great features and lots of practical applications for those with relatively small amounts of data, and that makes it pretty useful for the sole trader. But when we get in to the realms of several users sharing large objects or large volumes of data and desiring relatively fast access, it starts to become inappropriate. I would imagine that would apply to just about every industry.
I would tend to think the opposite. I reckon the majority of industries/offices/businesses can do away with local wired storage altogether and it will only get easier to do so. Most people spend their day on email, online applications and a few other apps. Local servers will not give sufficient advantage to outweigh the cost and pain of running them.
The cloud is just another technology. It will impact how we work and provide new alternative, but ultimately, it is just another technology and it too will find its place.
There have been many ‘just another technologies’. For me cloud solutions are not among them. I find cloud solutions the most major advance since the internet itself. It has only just begun and will get much much better.
Let’s dig up this thread in five years and see where the world has gone!
