Tuesday, December 23, 2008 Limpag: Living in the ‘cloud’ By Max Limpag Celltalk
ONLINE LIFE. In 2005, I experimented with keeping all my essential files and data online. I had accounts to the latest free online storage service. Free wikis, to-do lists, reminder alerts—you name it and I had an account with it.
I stored articles I was working on in various free online storage services and for several months, I even managed my articles using code version control offered by yet another free service. I ultimately ended up using Google Docs for storing articles I’m working on and keeping track of revisions .
All my tasks were managed by a succession of free web-based task managers and reminder services. For a while, I was so enamored with experimenting on how to get things done online that I wasn’t actually getting things done.
Then everything crashed.
SERVICE DISRUPTION. In late 2006, a strong quake struck Taiwan and cut telecommunication cables that carried data services to the Philippines . This resulted in Internet service disruption that took weeks to fix.
I was then with a different Internet service—one that took several weeks to recover from the service disruption.
By the end of January 2007, my home Internet connection was still either cut or so slow it was virtually unusable.
Suddenly, my experiment on online services seemed a complete disaster. I could no longer access crucial files because either I had no Internet connection or the connection was too slow.
It took me weeks to recover from the disruption, which effectively ended my online experiment.
NEW EXPERIMENT. Fast forward three years and I’m itching to go on another experiment. I’m confident that this time, Internet services and redundancy have come to a point that we can quickly recover from major problems such as the cutting of a major underseas data cable.
What’s with this living in the “cloud” stuff, you ask?
The concept was succinctly explained in a statement attributed to Sun co-founder Scott McNealy and that later became the company’s motto: the network is the computer. The idea is that the device you are using merely serves as an interface to a network computer that performs the computing function from storage to actual services.
It took a while for the concept to take off with consumers but nowadays, it’s common to see people storing data and files and even performing tasks online—using the network as the computer. And what’s better, many of these services are free.
The next iteration of these web-based services is that these will increasingly go mobile. In a year or two, we can start using our phones with these free online services.
