Cloud computing is a huge breakthrough in the way we approach data management, and computing in general, and it is no wonder that people are calling this technology revolutionary and world changing. However, when you really consider it, cloud computing is pretty much still in its infancy, and there are issues that simply didn’t yet get the chance to be addressed.
The focus of this article won’t be on purely technical issues, but we will instead try and discuss the choices that cloud services providers are consciously making. Namely, as is the case with just about any service that people might need, no one will be prepared to offer it without somehow being able to profit from it. There are different ways in which providers of cloud computing services are getting paid for their work, but not all of them are as damaging to the basic concept as the decision to tie up the data that you have in your storage to a certain application.
One of the ideas behind clouds was that you can have your data freely accessible from wherever you might want to access it. While there are some services which don’t try and force you to use your data only in a single specific way, there are plenty of those who will impose such restrictions. Basically, what they are doing is tying a specific service to your data, which is then made useless if you don’t want to use the service anymore.
This kind of exclusivity is negating the greatest advantage that cloud systems could otherwise have. If you know that you technically still have your data, but can be prevented from accessing it just because of the discontinuation of a particular service can be very unsettling. One kind of limitation of having to have your data stored locally has been replaced by another of being tied a particular service provider and their set of rules and abilities.
Even though there are providers who are completely straightforward, and don’t require anything of you, but simply allow you to use their storage space and use the data you have stored there in any way that you want, the trend of forcing you to use a particular app or service to access your data is far from dying out. While it is completely understandable that providers have to earn money in order to keep offering their services, this kind of approach goes against everything that cloud systems should stand for.
These are just the, shall we say, ideological objections to the way that system is organized. There are of course, numerous other issues with cloud systems, including the questions of security and privacy, as well as a number of other technical details. Those kinds of problems, however, are being addressed constantly, and people are fully aware of the need for improvement in those regards. Solving such issues is only a matter of the level of technical advancement. The problems we talked about, however, can only be solved by a change in the approach of the providers who are consciously placing limitations on something that should be limitless.
About the author: Richardo is is writer and blogger, loves to explore and write about various technology and internet trends. Currently he is writing for Crucial web hosting Australia , about virtual servers,VPS hosting, free web hosting and similar .
