Cloud computing has been around for a number of years at this point, growing slowly (and in the interests of fair disclosure, we should mention that CTACS has been promoting and supporting it since 2008). But this week the stakes have been greatly upped, as Google have finally launched (sort of) their long rumoured Google Drive and Microsoft have revamped their SkyDrive service. Both of these services give you private space on the internet, along with the ability to 'sync' your data across multiple computers, plus access it from a Smartphone. Not that they are the only players in town: other big names are Apple with their iCloud and the well-known Dropbox service that uses Amazon's S3 cloud. Plus there are a myriad of smaller players.
Most of these services operate in a similar way. You sign up with one of them; all of them offer free accounts with a limited amount of storage. If you outgrow it, you can buy more on a pay monthly or pay annually basis. Actually, the limited amount of storage is not that limited: with Dropbox you get an initial 2GB, iCloud gives you 5GB, Google Drive gives 5GB and Microsoft SkyDrive gives 7GB. It has been estimated that less 1% of users get anywhere near these volumes of data, so it's quite generous by 2012 standards. You may not actually need to sign up either; for instance, if you have a Hotmail or live@edu account then you've automatically got SkyDrive.
Your space can be accessed from a browser, from an app on a Smartphone, or by installing an application on your PC. Browser access is universal - go to any internet connected computer in the world, login to the website and there is your stuff. Depending on the service, you may be able to view it in situ, or optionally download it onto that computer. Both SkyDrive and Google Drive have embedded applications so you can edit the documents directly on the cloud; with SkyDrive you have the web versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote, so it's all very familiar(ish). Smartphone apps are usually more limited, but can be expected to improve with time. As Google are also responsible for Android, used by most of the world's Smartphone manufacturers, a good experience with Google Drive can be expected.
However, accessing files from a browser is, well, rather clunky. What people really want is something that is or behaves as though it was a normal disk drive, so they can open files directly from Word or Excel, or view files with Windows Explorer, or drag files on and off it. In other words, something familiar that doesn't require them to learn any new ways of working. There have been several attempts to achieve this in recent years, with varying degrees of success. The problem is that the Internet is still relatively slow, tens or hundreds of times slower than a real disk drive. Try and save a 10 MB PowerPoint file onto the cloud and it will typically take several minutes rather than several seconds. To get around that requires a piece of client software for the computer that lets you save instantly to a local drive or folder, which is then uploaded or synced transparently in the background to the cloud.
The fact that things are stored on the cloud now allows for another possibility – syncing from multiple computers. What this means is that you can install the client computer on all of your computers, make a change on one of them and have it automatically reflected on the other computers. This is of great benefit to anyone who has a laptop or netbook as well as a desktop computer in the home or office: far more convenient and reliable than having to worry about copying things to a USB memory drive and then worrying about whether you’ve got the most up-to-date version and so on.
It’s not a coincidence that Microsoft have updated their SkyDrive service this week – it was specifically timed to take a bit of shine off the announcement of Google Drive, which launched the following day. And, both of these vendors clearly have Dropbox in their sights as the common ‘enemy’. It’s too early to comment on how good Google Drive, as the launch is protracted and at the time of writing not too many people are able to get their hands on it. Plus there is some early controversy: Google’s T&C’s state that they have the right to use stuff you store with them, plus the Chinese government have banned it altogether for now. However, SkyDrive is now a very polished product that works very well, both as a sync and backup tool and as a means of sharing files with other people. The integration of SkyDrive with the forthcoming Windows 8 would seem to imply a strong future for it. Maybe clouds do, after all, have silver linings.