Tuesday, March 15, 2011

My PC in the Cloud

Something I have been thinking about for a couple of years now is when or whether I'll be able to have everything I have today on my personal PC in the cloud.

My vision is to have all of my applications and data instantly available no matter where I go.  I'm not talking about GotoMyPC or Back To My Mac.  I want my computer hosted in a reliable cloud so I don't have to manage my own backups, worry about my own hardware (and its failures), manage my RAM and hard disk space dynamically, and have snapshots.  Basically, I want all the benefits of the cloud that I can get for corporate infrastructure, but on a personal / family basis.  I want the ease of access from thin clients (netbooks, tablets, and anything else) from anywhere on the Internet.

I realize using my applications like video editing may not work so well in a cloud environment, and now that I have made the switch to Mac, there are licensing issues as well for the operating system I would like to use.  I know many of the applications I use on my PC are available as SaaS offerings, but I don't want to get into the situation where all of my various forms of data are locked up in a variety of SaaS offerings hosted by a wide variety of companies, making it difficult to manage all the different access controls and account for all the different kinds of data stored in different places.

Security and reliability would become major factors for me if my PC were in the cloud.  I depend on firewalls, access controls, and strong passwords to secure my personal systems.  In the cloud, I would also need the assurance of privacy, encryption, audit trail, jurisdiction control, portability (if I were to need to change providers), and data lifecycle management -- everything about which I have concerns from a business perspective, but am even more worried about when it comes to my personal data.

No comments:

Post a Comment