Gnomie Roberto asks:
“Will personal servers be replaced by cloud networking?”
Chris Pirillo answers:
“This is a really good question, because I think we all face this, especially if we’re afraid of letting our data be out there. Of course, usually the people who say they’re most afraid are the ones who use all these services and put their data out there without giving it a second thought. They’ll go to a restaurant and they hand their credit card over to someone they don’t know without worry — that’s probably more dangerous than half the stuff you do on the Web.
“Not that I know what you do on the Web. I’m not spying on you!
“Either way, I don’t think these cloud-based services that allow you to collaborate, create, share, store, and operate on the Internet will be replaced by personal data centers or personal storage devices — or vice versa. I think there’s a place for both, and I think for ultimate security, you wouldn’t want to share anything. You wouldn’t want to put anything on the cloud. You would want to keep everything local. So I don’t think personal servers are going to be replaced by what’s happening in the cloud, but I think people have to be more mindful of what they’re putting out there. I wouldn’t put anything out there on the cloud if it could be seen by anybody (or everybody).
“Could you imagine using an online backup service to discover that it had been hacked into and all your sensitive data could have been pried into? One would hope that you had encryption and several levels of passwords protecting that data. A lot of the big online backup providers have already taken steps to avoid this kind of nightmare before it becomes an issue, but it’s still a scary notion.
“I back up locally and take it offsite once a year. Most of what I do happens on the Web, but I don’t really do anything that, if anyone else saw it, would mean the end of the world.
“So I don’t think that cloud computing will ever replace personal storage uses and needs — certainly not today, and I hope not into the future.
“So there’s my answer to this question! What about you? Do you think that personal servers will ever be replaced by cloud networking?”
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The only problem I see with Cloud computing and it is actually a pretty big concern are the privacy and security risks.
The only problem I see with Cloud computing and it is actually a pretty big concern are the privacy and security risks.