I am currently in the process of putting together a reel of film and video work, and as such I decided to retrieve (via Video Downloadhelper) a few clips I put up a few years ago on putfile.com. The first thing you’ll notice if you click on that link is that it redirects to ebaumsworld.com, which I thought was strange. The second thing you would notice, after a little googling around, is that putfile.com doesn’t exist anymore, and subsquently neither do any of the user videos stored there. There was no forewarning, no email advising me to retrieve the media I had stored there. Cloud computing may be the latest trend to captivate the tech industry, but just as the analogy would logically extend, this particular cloud simply dissipated.
I may have the clips I need somewhere on DVD, but then again I may not. Potentially all that work is gone (but then; art is impermanent [that link is itself associated with a cloud, and may one day disappear]). However, the push for cloud computing continues, with Google already well entrenched and its two tech counterparts Microsoft and Apple both heavily promoting their flirtations with the cloud. Consumers are demanding it too, out of a desire for smaller, lighter machines; universal access across multiple computers; and sheer economy. As netbooks become more ubiquitous, and other portable computers shift towards lighter but less capacious solid-state drives, a user has little choice but to trust their documents to the ethereal data stream. Asus is currently offering one-year of 500 gigabytes of online storage with their highest-end EEE PC. Dropbox offers a free 2 gigabyte virtual folder, upgradeable for a fee. Valve’s incredibly popular Steam game service not only stores the games you own and provides them whenever and wherever you want, it now holds on to all your saved data as well, so your characters, progress, game options and control settings automatically travel to wherever you’re accessing the service from. Google is certainly more than happy to hang on to everyone’s data, as information is their sole commodity; just as a bank is happy to hold onto your money (and use it to generate more of their own). In fact, Google’s Chrome Operating System is the next step towards a computer that operates entirely within the cloud.
Technically speaking, the cloud isn’t as ambiguous as the name suggests. Everything is physically is stored on a server somewhere. However, it may as well be a hazy and intangible thing, because those servers belong to someone, and that person is ultimately unaccountable for the access to your content. If that server changes hands, as in the case of Putfile and as often happens in the tumultuous land of internet capitalism, the tenuous connection to your documents can be severed almost instantly.
Imagine a world where Google makes a few crucial business missteps, and, to stay in the black, they desperately sell off Youtube to a company that then mismanages the service and goes out of business itself. Not only is that an unimaginable amount of data lost, but it’s also an enormous shift in many people’s everyday lives. Next to go could be Picasa, and with it billions of photographs; art, memories and records. Last may be Google Docs, the “lightest” of the clouds and potentially the most resilient to change. Everyone’s work, from business to art to pleasure, could slip from the grasp of its creators.
While this is all bleak and, admittedly, unimaginable, it is entirely possible, as the online services we rely on for this up and coming technology are all privately owned and subject to the whim of the market place and global affairs. Would your Flickr account (and its accompanying hundreds –if not thousands– of photos) survive something like a war on American soil, or a natural disaster that plunges North America into an economic depression? What about your iTunes store account, which is tracking the hundreds of dollars worth of music and television you’ve purchased? If Wordpress goes down, will all the hours of writing on your blog be lost forever?
The king of the cloud network, Google, may also be the most resilient, with its army of cargo containers packed with servers; mobile data centers, each containing within its vast capacity a copy of the entire internet. This is how Google maintains its zippy search speed (it searches the container nearest you), its nearly continuous uptime (if a server goes down, move on to the next), and its vast storage space. Google is even planning off-shore data centers; floating server platforms that will further increase efficiency and redundancy, while eliminating costs such as real-estate and property tax. However, even with all these steps Google is taking to preserve its dominance over data, if Google as an entity were to be removed, and the interface with those data centers lost, the information would be nearly irretrievable.
One way to provide further security and increased accountability to those who interface the cloud (which is nearly all of us, even if you use Gmail or Hotmail), may be for these services to become institutionalized, as our libraries and schools are to ensure their permanence. If Informaton were to become a cornerstone of modern civilization, the same as Healthcare of Law, it’s longevity would be further assured. It would change from a cloud to a basic right. Eventually (as the software and technology improve, and as internet service speeds increase) if you log on to any computer, anywhere, with your name and password, all of your programs, documents and information will just be there, the way you can walk into any clinic and have your medical records listed by way of your Healthcare number. Or consider how your financial and employment records follow your Social Insurance Number. The government would be the custodians of the cloud, and would take every measure necessary to ensure it’s reliability. The BBC just released word of a study that strongly urges Internet Access be a human right, and that government must “regard the internet as basic infrastructure – just like roads, waste and water”. Wherever Internet Access goes, so goes the cloud.
That may all be a bit much, and it would certainly be less chic (and potentially less liberating) to log into your government regulated email, or connect through a stifling Federal social networking site. However, while the cloud is both incredibly flexible, efficient and cost-effective to us, the consumer, it is expensive, volatile and cumbersome to those who provide it. The actual cost for these services come as a reduction in its permanence and resiliency. The answer to the problem of data storage, as always, is to back up the information is as many different ways as possible, as often as possible. This largely defeats the purpose of having the cloud at all, but life is about compromise; and at this moment, my demo reel is going to have to compromise with the clips which weren’t lost in the cloud.
Interesting post on Data Centers here: http://blogs.msdn.com/kenj/archive/2009/07/02/microsoft-cargo-container-data-center-comes-online.aspx
