With Cloud Computing we’re invited to store our personal and professional data into a Service Provider, usually without needing the knowledge of any kind of technical “dark” details. This is great! Remember that with Cloud Computing we should be able to let this “dark” IT details be part of the past. We should be able to focus our energy on our core business.
As I try to discuss in earlier posts, to have personal data in places that we don’t completely control is hard to accept, especially for technical experts. The trust (reputation/security) subjects are not the only relevant matter. We must focus our attention in other “simple” things such as connectivity, Internet access availability and even Internet communications latency time.
To solve, or at least, to reduce the impact of Internet disconnectivity, Google has been developing the Google Gears. With it, I can, as an example, continue to review my posts on Worpress (www.cloudviews.org backend) or to make a presentations using Google Docs. Gears is having daily developments and its set of features is also increasing very fast. Things like client’s data encryption (also discussed in this gears google groups post) or a lot of other features are under developing, but Gears doesn’t solve every problems, especially the ones related with enterprises.
If a company, even a small one, loses its Internet connectivity, Google Gears will solve the problems (in a small part, at least in the time being) of every individual user, but they will lose the possibility to continue working together. This may not be a problem for micro-companies, but it will become more relevant as the company size increases.
To “attack” this kind of problems we will need more advanced solutions (a kind of Google Gears Enterprise). The solutions must be able to locally cache the data, but they also need to understand how the applications are working. Without this “intelligence” they will lose the ability to allow users continue working as a team.
In this field, we already have some work done, at least in the first part of the problem – locally caching date in the enterprise. As an example, you can take a look at the “Ventus Proxy“. I’m looking forward to see how they will evolve this kind of products or solutions.
