Is it all clear skies ahead for cloud computing?

Having your data stored online or running your servers via remote computers is taking off - but it can get stormy

\( \bullet \) TimAnderson

\( \bullet \) The Guardian. Thursday September 25 2008

Photograph: Jonny Le Fortune/Corbis

One Sunday in July, the images began to wink out on the popular micro-blogging service Twitter. The photo-sharing site SmugMug flashed up "Service unavailable". Jungle Disk, which advertises "Reliable online storage", stopped working. The reason: Amazon's Simple Storage Service, known as S3, went offline for up to eight hours. It was the second significant outage this year, following a similar but shorter incident in February.

Amazon S3 is a celebrated example of cloud computing, meant to be the wave of the future. "Using Amazon's S3 has about the same cost and complexity as hosting the images ourselves, but we had thought that the reliability of Amazon would be significantly higher. But that now seems wrong," said Lukas Biewald, who runs an image assessment service called FaceStat (bit.ly/cloudy2). Failures like this have a domino effect, and the more cloud computing catches on, the bigger the impact. Amazon does offer a service level agreement, but reimbursed fees are small compensation for loss of business.

So what is cloud computing? "There's a lot of confusion because everyone is tagging what they do with the word 'cloud'. It's the buzzword of the moment," says Tony Lucas, chief executive of XCalibre, aUK ISP which has created an ondemand computing service called FlexiScale (flexiscale.com).

Somewhere, nowhere

For some people, cloud computing simply means that their stuff is out there on the internet instead of being on a laptop or office server.Aclassic example is Google Mail - along with the word processing, spreadsheet and calendar applications called Google Apps - which can be used from any web browser. If your computer is stolen, the data remains safe on the net. Research shows that, at least in North America, 69% of web users make some use of such applications (bit.ly/cloudy3).

Google's Chrome browser and its mobile phone operating system, called Android, are developed specifically to enable cloud computing. Features in Chrome include desktop shortcuts to websites, a fast scripting engines and a set of extensions called Gears which allow web applications, when suitably coded, to continue working even when offline (…)