The Cloud - Snow! Bring it on

As I look out at the wintery scene from my home office window and suffer pangs of guilt at not making it into the office for the second day running (did I really try hard enough?) my conscience is somewhat lightened by the fact that I have easily completed two days work and that I had to do it from home rather than the office was academic.

This is, of course, one of the principal advantages to the Cloud and one that seems to get lost in the various discussions and arguments – Business Continuity and the ease of working from anywhere as circumstances demand.

By using applications such as E-conomic, DropBox and Zoho (I have blogged about these previously) I am enabled to work on my various projects without any disruption that would otherwise have been caused by the inclement weather – I was even able to give a new client a Web demo of E-conomic using GoTo Meeting.com.

I have, in fact, made use of the long Xmas break to complete my move to Cloud computing for virtually everything that I now do. Apart from the business applications above I have moved everything currently on my laptop Cloudwise as follows:

Personal e-mail:                                              Google mail
Photos etc                                                       Picassa
Music                                                               Mp3tunes Music Locker
Banking                                                           On line bank software and Buxfer

One of my prized gadgets is my Acer Netbook which is now running solely on Jolicloud. Jolicloud is a webbased operating system for netbooks which, apart form the basic UNIX software installed on the Netbook, operates totally on the Web and is an exciting foretaste of what we can expect from the Google Chrome operating system, which caused such a stir last year when it was announced.

I was intrigued by an advert running over the Xmas period from PC World for a desktop PC with 1 terabyte capacity for just under £400. I am not entirely certain as to how much a terabyte is but it is certainly more than the 20 megabyte capacity that my first office PC had all those years ago!

Apart from being amazed at how cheap it was, it does make me wonder that in view of what I have just written, why exactly would one need such a large capacity – is this not a bit of a throwback to earlier times, rather like the old American gas guzzling saloons developed at a time when petrol was cheap and in what seemed limitless supply.

So I am now entirely Cloud based – un-fazed by the Weather or other natural disasters. I can work anywhere and anytime as long as I have internet access – and yes I can tether my Iphone and use that as a modem if needs be.

The only disadvantage to this, as far as I can see, is I have no excuse not to get my work done!