Ignorance of Decades

 

I always wondered when science will reach the point when humans no longer understand what’s going on. I’m not talking about ‘how things work’ question. For instance, Edison gave us electricity and Bell gave us the telephone. We didn’t know how they worked but we knew how to use them.  So why doesn’t this idea work with cloud computing too? It’s always interesting to see how we adopted new things in our life with or without any knowledge of it.

 

SMBs in the cloud

More and more small and medium-sized companies are using cloud-based services, but usually only apply these ideas in fundamental processes. Companies often organize email or share documents, but only 5 percent of them actually say that SMBs are cloud base.  

 

The latest Microsoft’s survey results show what services are use in cloud.  The most common home electronic service - mail is the most common (57%), but also popular is sharing of documents (42%), instant messaging, VoIP (31-31%) and cloud storage at (23%) as well.  Only (9%) of Internet office suites - such as Office 365 or GoogleDocs - make use of the cloud services.

 

 

 

Not so long ago, a company became a pioneer of the industry when they took advantage of the cloud. Over the past 12 months – according to Microsoft’s report - Office 365 services have tripled annual revenue. But the fact is that almost all SMBs companies have internet access, yet they don’t know they have been using the cloud.

Funny if you think about it. In the old days – we didn’t turn on the lights and say "I’m not using electricity", So today why do we say – "I don’t use the  cloud"  although I'm on the internet. Can we use ignorance as an excuse?

Who’s to blame?

 

Future? Unemployment? Pictures? Cloud? How does all this things come together? 

Do you want to find a job? It’s not easy these days. Do you use social network?  Since we post a bunch of pictures of our moments in life and what we want to share with our friends. But how is this activity affecting our future? Can the cloud be blamed for that? Nope. The answer is the users and their bad habits...and of course this requires knowledge of the cloud.

Reckless (Thoughtless) Youth

 Eric E. Schmidt - served as the CEO of Google until 2011 – He drew younger generation’s attention to the danger of posting pictures on Facebook. He warned them not to share too many personal events of themselves. He said –that the older generation made their mistakes, but there mistakes didn’t stay on the internet too long, so it was easy to move on. Teens today might say- who cares? It’s yesterday news now…Well that’s not quite true anymore!

Behind the scenes

To store our pictures on the cloud is fast and simple. It happens in real time and we enjoy this fact. But do we know what happens behind the scenes?

 

 

When you take that picture and posted on your social media site many copies have been made to be available to your friends. So it means your picture landed on many computers any many data warehouses which can be uploaded in anytime. And these computers are all connected together. So it means that your picture gets replicated many different times just to get shared. From that one photo your social sites make many copy to ensure that it gets shared. That’s called the reliability of cloud. As you know, it needs to be reliable.. There when you want it.

Do you feel the danger yet?

Hungary must think ahead!

When a young boy discovers his surroundings all you can do as a parent, is think ahead and look out for his safety. I find that I’m already one step ahead before he takes his next step... no question that my job is to teach him what to do next. 

Based on my experience cloud computing issues are still quite immature in Hungary. And I’ve also noticed that there is very little content or information about cloud computing written for the Hungarian market. I’d expect that Big companies like Microsoft, and Google would pay attention a small markets like Hungary. So they can help us grow, and mature with them in mind. Most of the time they do not…. But sometimes there are surprises.

I was looking for information about secure cloud computing and I found that last Monday Microsoft published a cloud paper on ’trusting’ the cloud in Hungarian. So it’s really interesting to finally see how a big company like Microsoft is thinking ahead and trying to take advantage by working to provide more intelligent and comprehensive information to help educate the Hungarian market about cloud computing issues.

And what is this report? This information is extremely technical, so be ready for a hard read!.....But I tell you I think this is a big deal! To have a big company commit and to try and get companies around Hungary thinking about the Cloud in a more logical way, is about time..

The paper is called ‘The Microsoft Approach to Cloud Trasparancy’  and provides Microsoft’s perspective on using an open standard called the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) in framing what companies need to consider when adopting cloud services. The paper references a repository of papers that includes information from most major cloud providers, such as Amazon, Box, and yes Microsoft to help pick a good cloud provider!. The repository is called the known as the Security, Trust and Assurance Registry (STAR) for its cloud solutions. So this is how the cloud providers are working to try and help us grow up, and become a real player in the cloud market.

 

 

Locked up in the cloud!

 

How safe is the cloud? I think I can say yes (most of the time) but security in the cloud is not that simple. In the old days if you’ve locked something up in a safe place there was only one way in and out. Placing your files in the cloud gives you two points of protection, one on the server side and one on the user side.

 

 

 

See most cloud storage sites use the same level of security that most banks use and it’s a high quality protection from most hacker.

http://www.web2andmore.net/2013/04/19/considerations-when-choosing-a-cloud-storage-provider/

 

But what about the user side?…What can I do for my own protection? Well, as long as my password habits concern, I think a lot! Let’s see how can I be a smart user!

 First off you have to choose a good password. The more complicate password you use the safer data you’ll get. For that you need to combine password which contains letters, symbols and numbers in unusual way.  And what’s if you create a real good password? Change it frequently!

Free password generator:

 

http://www.pctools.com/guides/password/

http://www.microsoft.com/security/online-privacy/passwords-create.aspx

 

 

Secondly, don’t share your password! Even if you trust to someone never tell them your password. Another important thing is use different password for different sites. Make sure you don’t use the same password for your e-mail account as you use at banking site.

 I know it’s annoying to create and change password for each site we use and we easily get confused how we will remember all of them?

 

 

 

Well LastPass can solve this problem easily. It’s a smart solution for those who only want to memorize one password and let LastPass remember the rest of them for you…. And it’s free to start using it!.

Finally, be careful when you logged into a site from a different devices. Make sure you log out and don’t save your passport in public computers.

Considering these easy steps you can create a real secure life on your cloud.

Personal Cloud

 

Personal or Private Cloud?

Good question!  As far as my personal devices of organization concerns... it is personal cloud.

Just as many of you -  these days - I use all my new devices as well, but tell you the truth I find difficult to synchronize them or it takes time think it over where should I look for what I need. Is it on my laptop, or my desktop, or my tablet? What about my latest music downloads? And I haven’t mentioned my photos yet. Until now my best option was to email my stuff to myself and use my USB driver to bring data from one to the other.  Therefore I’d rather look for some secure and reliable option …with lots of flexibility of course.

The good news is that many companies are already offering web-based data center services. Which means you keep your files in one place also share your files with your friends no matter its location.

This kind of services has been around for a while, but the idea about collecting it together in one user experience is relatively new, this new idea is Personal Cloud. The challenge is to make sure that your Personal Cloud integrates to all the services you care about such as Microsoft App, Mac icloud, or Android devices and apps.

Market leaders such as Amazon Cloud Drive or Microsoft Sky Driver are great cloud services, but they are based their own cloud services, and you still need to use a browser most of the time to use these services. Google Drive is a newer provider that also provides storage, and cloud based apps. Apple iCloud meanwhile is only a media storage service and the final one to mention would be DropBox which seems to be a great solution and can providers great offline access to files.

The only piece missing is a way to get to all these services, easily.

Now there are guides that help you become better at setting up your own personal cloud such as Lifehack How to set up your own private cloud storage service in five minutes with owncloud. Basic idea is use owncloud.org or a something new like the start up zeropc.com to collect all the cloud services into one cloud capability. This is a great way to start to take advantage of the ideas of a personal cloud. Clever.

 

zeropc.com	owncloud.org

Cloud computing used by all devices

I’ve spent too much time on hi-tech devices and I found myself influenced that so many things out there what I willing know. I got excited about this and this made me think that I should dig into deep in real technologies of the future. I’m hunger for new challenges and I’m interested in new things even if it still tough for me…so I've decided to spread my wings and fly..

 

 

Cloud…So it is must be in the air right? Seems to me that my first impression about cloud computing is access to…space..(cloud storage) plenty of space which brings plenty of possibilities which would be great since space is limited here physically. Think about data center, storage, power, networking, service and technical team who these service setting up a data center is expensive. Looking at the providers that provide space we see that capacity, and speed becomes important to making a decision. It’s interesting that the fastest provider, SugarSync is hardly known around the Hungarian market.

 

 

So, what is cloud?  The answer is simple.  Networks both private and public connected to each other that provide a service… is essentially cloud much like what we call services on the internet today. The terms used for cloud computing are important to know such as SaaS is software as a service, Sugarsync provides a SaaS service. Then Platform which is a service..they give you application programing interfaces (API’s) which let you build software on their software. For instance Farmville this software was built as a SaaS (Software as a Service) it is built on the Facebook environment.

So let’s find out more…

What’s the power on using it? Is it secure? How much it cost? Is it reliable? How many application it has??? Who can use it? How would it make you change of think of your business? Or your home?