I thought in this post I would talk about something not directly related to XML. At my local bank, I picked up a free copy of the Business Monthly newspaper. There were many stories of interest. However I really enjoyed reading the Pounding the Keyboard column by Cliff Feldwick. This particular column was on stupid computer ideas. I have not read this paper before, and I never heard of Cliff. However I was impressed that Cliff not only gave out his email address, he provided his telephone number.Cliff went though a couple technologies he thought were pointless. One of them was Cloud Computing. He said this is really nothing more than last year’s Software as a Service. In fact, this concept has already been known as Application Service Providers, Business Process Outsourcing, and Managed Service Providers. In other words, this is just another fancy buzzword.
Cloud Computing is a bad idea according to Cliff. I think others share his opinion as well. Essentially cloud computing is where the application you run is hosted in the cloud. It does not physically run on your computer. The risk this poses is what will happen to you if your cloud provider goes bankrupt. You will most likely be out of the service. You may also have lost all your data as well. Running applications directly on your computer is the most secure, as well as the fastest option.
To be fair, cloud computing does have some ideas of interest. This may apply more to the enterprise level. It is certainly easier to manage one cloud server than the many desktops spread across your organization. You can handle backups quicker. It is easier to ensure the one server is always up regardless of power conditions. In general, it should be easier to manage. To tell the truth, I have not been paying much attention myself to the cloud computing hype train. Perhaps this is for the better.
