Trusting the Cloud
I've seen various articles recently, asking should we trust ('cloud based' apps such as) Google Docs for serious work?
Overlooking the fact that Google Docs doesn't offer the functionality that some clients seem to need, I think we're well on the way to having an online office.
However there needs to be a change: Our data (docs etc) need to be stored in a distributed way – synchronised across multiple (online) services.
So it won't matter if system-A (say, Google Docs) goes down, because your documents will have been synchronised with system-B (say, Zoho) and system-C, in fact any number of other systems.
As long as one of those systems is your local system, it won' t even matter that you can't get online; you can just switch back to your preferred desktop editor like Word.
So, questions;
- what are the technical and security implications of this approach?
- will vendors play nice and share your data accross with your nominated systems?
- what else needs to happen to make this a reality?
- are we already there and I'm just unaware of existing tools?
3 comments:
Hey,
One step towards this is to use a cloud sync platform to sync your offline and online docs.
http://www.syncplicity.com/ does this with Google Docs and your desktop(s), but I had a few bugs with some files not syncing and moved to windows live mesh, which DOES work, but doesn't do Google Docs...
divydovy,syncplicity does allow you to create desktop backups. But I think the long-term solution is to agree on a common protocol over which Zoho, Google Docs (any number of other apps) can sync documents.
Hey Danny, yep totally agree.
The syncplicity suggestion was really just to avoid having to totally trust the cloud.
Hopefully the need for cross-cloud compatability will help drive cross-desktop-app compatability too!
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