When Steve Wozniak joined Mike Daisy on a stage after his show „The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs“ in Washington, he expressed his concern about Cloud. "I really worry about everything going to the cloud. I think it's going to be horrendous. I think there are going to be a lot of horrible problems in the next five years." Wozniak stated. He explained how users do not own anything in the Cloud, they sign away their data to provider, "The more we transfer everything onto the web, onto the cloud, the less we're going to have control over it."
Security is and will be THE major concern for Cloud computing in the years to come. Companies will try everything to attract more users to the cloud. This will include giving them some nice features like synchronising multiple devices or having access to your data everywere with just an internet connection/ The question is; is it really worth it? We have had scandals in the past when companies that manage cloud services have had to give up data of their users to Law enforcement. The main problem in these cases was that the provider had the data of multiple users stored on the same hard drive. When a single user on that shared storage drive was found guilty a pedophilia case the company in question was forced to give up the data of other users on that „drive“, regardless of their innocence. My advice would be to use the Cloud only for data you are willing to lose, because there is always the possiblity that someone will want to take a look at it or even misuse it.
[Ed- We have discussed this at legnth and completely agree. The Cloud is the big push for multiple vendors. It provides them with a continuous revenue stream which is good for them. Unfortunately for any users that buy into this they have very few rights when it comes to their data. A quick look at the Megaupload case will show you haw dangerous it can be. There are people that still do not have access to their legtimate data. It is also important to remember that there is no system that is completely secure, they all have flaws in them and are vulnerable to compromise.]
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