Cloud technology is a hot new technology that few seem to know or understand anything about, though they should. While cloud computing has been around for a few years, it really seems to be coming to the public’s attention a bit more in the past few months to a year. I consider myself somewhat of a techy person, and honestly, I never knew or paid much attention to it until just recently.
I remember a while back seeing these personal cloud hard drives for sale, and reading briefly on them to find out how they worked, but never considering using the technology at the time. Months later, I started getting notices from Amazon.com (with whom I have a seller account) and they were offering me space on their cloud. Again, I did not show much interest on it at first, but eventually I did, and uploaded my entire music collection to it (all 43,000 tracks). In upgrading my virus scanning program recently, they too offered me a small amount of space to store documents, photos, music, etc. on their cloud, and access them anywhere from an app or website. It sure saved a lot of time and space being able to access my entire music and photo collection through an app on my mobile phone or any computer wherever I am.
The Blaze recently picked up on the article discussing this confusion in the minds of a majority of people when it comes to cloud computing. Citrix Systems has posted the results of their recent survey of 1000 people 18 and older, and have found that their knowledge of the terms and function of cloud computing is anything but clear, but it is to be expected. “While significant market changes like this take time, the transition from the PC era to the cloud era is happening at a remarkable pace. The most important takeaway from this survey is that the cloud is viewed favorably by the majority of Americans, and when people learn more about the cloud they understand it can vastly improve the balance between their work and personal lives,” stated Kim DeCarlis, vice president of corporate marketing at Citrix.
Some of the public’s ignorance in this matter may stem from much of the discussion in the tech world, which seems over the head of most end-users, and may be causing them to look the other way until they are confronted head on with the technology. The survey reports that when it comes to the reasons why people who know about the cloud have not started using it, the results are almost equally split between cost, security and privacy concerns. While cost is a factor, in the long run, cloud technology can save money, though that is not the main focus.
In the past, there have been many concerns about this technology, and the ability for full usage of it was not available in time for this year’s Olympics. Even so, cloud technology is here and it appears to have the staying power to be around until the next hot new technology comes along. While it has a way to go before maturing for more wide usage, those in the IT world would do good to stay ahead of the curve by understanding this technology as it grows. For those in the computer maintenance and repair field it may be more important to plan now, as “some industry experts believe that the need for IT jobs will migrate to the back end of the cloud computing system.” As for me, my personal usage of cloud technology has been quite positive, and therefore I plan to discover how I can utilize it even more.
Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net
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