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Business Daily: The risks of Cloud computing

05/08/2009

The risks of Cloud computing

BBC World Service - Business Daily, The risks of Cloud computing

Takes you to the Cloud, the far-away place where all your computing may one day be done.

Takes you to the Cloud, the far-away place where all your computing may one day be done. Should you come to the Cloud with a  joyful heart or worry about losing your own individual computing power?

Business Daily takes you to the Cloud, the far-away place where all your computing may one day be done. We'll whisk you there to find out if you can trust it, or whether keeping everything on your own computer will always be better. Should you come to the Cloud with a  joyful heart or worry about losing your own individual computing power?

Bits of jargon come and bits of jargon go and nobody's much the wiser, but when people talk of the Cloud, you should take notice. It is a radical change in the way all of us do our computing. At the moment we have our own computers on which we put programmes, like Microsoft Word to write stuff - and data - all that information, pictures and letters, that kind of thing.

With the Cloud everything gets held and done remotely - up in the Cloud as it were, as the BBC's Technology correspondent Rory Cellan-Jones explained.  

With Cloud computing, all you do is carry around a little gizmo that lets you connect to the internet, to the Cloud. And that means that if you lose your gizmo, you don't lose all your bank details and that novel you're not writing. It is the same for companies. At the moment, most of them have vast computing power on the premises. Some don't like the traditional way of computing. For example SF Bay Paediatrics in California  does much of its computing up in the Cloud. Andrew Johnson, one of the managers of the practice, says there are great advantages to this.    

Misha Nossik, based in Ottawa, is one of those clever people developing the Cloud with a company called SIMtone. What does he make of the criticism that with Cloud, you hand your details to big companies far away? After all, he says, we do that every day already.

So what's the problem?  Jonathan Zittrain is co-director of Harvard University's Berkman centre for internet and society, before that he was at  before that at Oxford University. He is one of the world's top thinkers on the law of the internet and the worldwide web - they're not the same thing, by the way:  the internet is the grand system and the web is just a part of it, the bit that we navigate round from web-site to web-site.  Professor Zittrain explained what he was worried about.

As Jonathan Zittrain points out, one of the snags with doing your computing remotely is that you don't actually own what you buy.  You pay for access to it.  Take the case of Amazon's Kindle. This is the gizmo Amazon sells for you to read books - but you don't own the books, you just rent them in effect.  And when a legal issue arose over one, Amazon just denied readers access, though it did repay their money.  Of course, if you had bought the real book you'd still have it.  And this is not an isolated case.  As our regular commentator Jeremy Wagstaff reveals, there's a shift of control from the consumer to the seller.

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