It doesn’t help the every 2-bit Tech company now claims to offer cloud services.

Once you have a website, some sales-type will push the “cloud-based documentation facility”.

One in five citing “benefits such as accessibility, ease of use, reduced of costs, security and business continuity.”
Funny that they should cite security in that list. Shows a lack of understand, as using cloud services means losing physical control of your data. Some cloud-companies fool people with irrelevant “security theatre” (Big gates, people with guns).
The answers to questions such as: “is my data backed up and how often?”, “who has physical access to my data?”, “Who has remote access & what are the checks?”, etc – can only really be taken on trust by a business. That’s why IT people are less enthused by the cloud computing hype than business people.
Cloud computing is cheaper, but not advisable for really critical info.

Cloud is easy, try explaining “Big Data”!

I love the way people are going lala about cloud computing when we don’t even have a decent broadband infrastructure in this country.

Cloud computing is not a technical term, it’s a marketing term.

Haha – I love the caption with the photo ;-)

I did my dissertation on Cloud Competing, and I definably would NOT recommend this Data storage method for housing of important data. you have to have an Internet connection and a good one at that, as most of you know the state of the broadband in Ireland is pretty crap. when I was doing research for my dissertation, I came across several cloud computing companies that went out of business, and consequently customers lost their data, but you won’t hear much about that in the media, especially at the moment, because the government are trying to sell Ireland as the “ideal location” for Cloud Competing Data Centres. the issue of security is a big one, when you hand over your data to a cloud computing company, the servers in which it’s stored may not be in the same country as its owner, issues can arise round the data protection laws of the country in which the data is stored. I could go on and on but I would urge people to do plenty of research before handing over data.

“on Internet based servers rather than on physical hard drives” – yeah right and Internet based servers surely use playdough made hard drives not real hard drives….

Did you know Sean O’Sullivan (dragons den) coined the term “cloud computing”

I Think these names are designed to confuse, they could just as easily have called it outside storage unit or something similar. But why keep things simple and logical when you can make them complicated.

Whatever about businesses, if the average home user is expected to store their personal files in the “cloud” and access them daily this can be a sizeable upload/download every month on top of your normal usage. Plus, these days game consoles use broadband and some companies like Netflix allow you to download movies for a fee, as each movie is up to several GB in size this adds more useage onto your broadband bill each month.
The average speed for most broadband users in Ireland would seem to be about 8 Mb, in theory at least, in reality you won’t get near that. If two or three people in the same house are using the same connection, a game console, downloading a movie or uploading/downloading data to the cloud then everything crawls to near dial-up speeds.
If you’re not on a broadband package with an unlimited download usage it won’t take long doing the above to download 40, 50 or 60 GB per month and exceed your download usage. As others have said if the average home user is expected to take this up they better do something about the broadband speeds in Ireland, its putting the cart before the horse to ask people to use something that the infrastructure isn’t there for.

Ok so there does seem to be a lot of junk statements in here. When you sign up for google docs or dropbox you get an amount of space on servers. This space is a container that is encrypted using your password and some of your other info. A for it not being secure that is a load of scare mongering. A lot of my clients use it and they are very concerned about protecting IP. As for the speed and broad band issue, unless your are using “cloud” storage to store your movies on your not going to exceed your max download limits. The files I work with are very big and my internet is quite slow, but it works away in the back ground with no problem. If you want added security then you can create your own encrypted containers using open source like true crypt. I agree with above statements that IT are more often a massive hindrance to users. The seem allergic to change.

The government has its head in the cloud full stop.