A new buzzword - 'Cloud Technology'

There is a new phrase emerging, which I've heard banded around a few times over the last few weeks; cloud technology.

In essence, cloud technology is all about virtualisation, allowing us to harness the power of the internet ever more. For example, rather than storing our most important files on our laptops or 'S drive', we could upload our files to a space (a cloud) on the internet where we can access them at any time or place of our choosing in the future.

We're not just talking about mere documents here either, imagine if, rather than a box under your desk, your computer's processing power and the software installed on it all came from another cloud. This means that we could happily roam between various computers with internet connections, being secure that we could still access exactly the same word processor, or graphics package or whatever it might be.

We're already starting to see cloud technology in action. Things like web-based email systems (hotmail, yahoo, googlemail) have for many years now, allowed us to access our email anytime any place. Google documents lets us store our most important documents online, for retrieval at our own convenience. Virtual desktops are now beginning to emerge (Jooce.com) with all the functionality we're used to in Windows.

Cloud technology looks like the next big development in IT and it's going to be difficult to avoid. What then, does this mean for YSJ? Will we adopt cloud technologies in the future? Will our s: drive become a thing of the past? What about physical space too - would we need to come into our physical office 5 days a week just to access the same files and programmes we could find from the computer in our spare bedrooms?

For more, have a read of this BBC article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/7465386.stm