Web-based or Computer-based?

Cloud computing is all the rage these days in many different industries.  What is it?  Essentially, it is moving applications and data off the local network or computer and storing it remotely on someone else’s server real estate.  Why is this a big deal?  There are competing schools of thought on this subject.  Truly it is not a new concept.  There has always been the in-house vs. out-source debate.  Cloud computing is just a fancy name for outsourcing.  When a company outsources a portion of their business, a certain level of control goes with it.  Is it safe to do this?

How about some examples?  In a post earlier this year, I gave a list of computer and web-based checkbook/budgeting software packages.  If you install locally, you have control over access to the programs.  However, if you are not at your computer, you have no way to know what is in the program.  If you used a web-based package, you could simply find a computer with internet access and log into your account to see how you are doing.  You can be at a friend’s house, at a conference, or at work and still access it. Someone else takes care of backing up the data so you are not stuck in the case of a hardware failure.

Other examples of outsourced data include:

• Content Management Systems (CMS) for web development rather than an html editor
• Google Docs for spreadsheet and word processing tasks rather than Office
• Gmail/Hotmail/Yahoo for email rather than a local client that downloads all your mail (Outlook)
• Photo storage like Flickr, Shutterfly rather than local storage
• PaycheckCity.com for paycheck calculations rather than PayBreeze
• Mozy for backups rather than tapes and external drives that are not always stored offsite
• Picnik.com for photo editing rather than Photoshop or Paint Shop

There are many other programs that exist.  Feel free to post comments with your examples.

However, as I experienced the other day, what happens if the host or remote computer holding your data goes down?  What happens if your internet access goes down?  There is certainly a risk to the hosted idea, but I think the greater availability of access to the data outweighs these risks.  It’s also much easier to switch computers if you don’t really have anything of value stored locally.  It’s also safer to discard the old hard drives if you know there is nothing personally identifiable on them.