Every remembrance that I have from a usual visit to my bank in the nineties, when I had started managing my own (small) bank account, always begins with a large standing queue.  But, suddenly, everything changed, and my dark remembrances were transformed into an “easy as click” sensation.

This new “click experiences” didn’t  have an easy start as I now remember it. In the begining, I had the same doubts and fears as everyone had. To have private information on the Web, especially the one’s regarding financial situation,  accessible to everyone, was a “terrifying” sensation. This “terrifying” sensation was always in opposition to the excitement of having a powerful personal finance managing application, and more, an application that we could used everywhere and on every scenarios – being on vacation and have the possibility to pay a bill that we had forgotten; making a last hour stock action’s investment; make a bank transfer to a friend; etc.

Those scenarios were, in fact,  very exciting, but as I vividly remember, the fear from losing the control over this new powerful application, and consequently, lose the control of our personal finances was always evermore present.

And how did this end? How has this incremental fear stopped? The answer is obviously not simple, but definitely, it must be related with reputation and trust links, I’ve already talked about that in a previous post. In this example, the solid reputation that the banks had,  together with a large development in security technologies,  were fundamental to create the trust links and to allow a phenomenal development in the home banking applications field.

And now, why are we so afraid to move to the Cloud? Why don’t we let ourselves be embraced by the power of having all our applications on the Web, not only our personal finances’ application, but all of them? My simple answer is: We don’t know what is the Cloud, or even, what is the Cloud is made of.

We must first realise that the Cloud is a group of services providers, like our bank an its home bank application. We must realise that, and then wait to see how these new service providers will construct their reputation and  how that reputation will be able to enhance our trust feeling.

I can now say that we should consider home banking as pre-historical Cloud Computing and an example to follow.

PS:
We are in an era where the banks’ reputation is not what it was back then, although this is completely out of the scope of this post, I think that this is something that will change. It must. Without this thing called reputation we won’t have the trust that has made possible this pre-historical Cloud Computing…