Is the cloud the way forward?

For the last couple of years I’ve been hard pushed to read a tech blog that doesn’t bang on about ‘the cloud’. For anyone who doesn’t know exactly what the cloud is, it allows you to save files, programmes and vast amounts of data online, securely. This gives you more freedom when you want to access it from more than one location.

A whole host of tech giants now have their own ‘clouds’ in place. Companies such as Google and Acer have worked together to create the ‘Chromebook’ – a laptop that stores all documents, programmes and everything else in the cloud. It seems the cloud is the future, but it’s not without problems.

Interestingly Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak recently voiced concerns about the cloud. Speaking in Washington he was reported in the Guardian as saying;

"I want to feel that I own things. A lot of people feel, 'Oh, everything is really on my computer,' but I say the more we transfer everything onto the web, onto the cloud, the less we're going to have control over it."

Many people have raised concerns over the security of cloud based systems. The reality is that since we’ve all started logging on to the internet with smartphones, laptops and tablets – the risk of having our data hacked have increased immeasurably. The cloud is not immune to these same risks.

That said, although saving all your documents online sounds may not be 100% safe, neither are conventional back-ups. Whilst you might save all your stuff on an external hard drive, the chances are you’ll keep in under the same roof as your originals, meaning the likes of fire and theft could be massive thorns in your side.