During the Worldwide Developer’s Conference (WWDC) held in San Francisco this June, Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled a major new feature for the Mac operating system – the iCloud.

In his WWDC keynote speech, Jobs claimed that 10 years ago his company had an important insight – to make the personal computer the hub for your digital existence. Photos, music, videos and more would all live here. And that’s exactly how things have been for the last decade.

But now, Jobs says that system has broken down. The culprit? Too many gadgets. From desktops to laptops to smartphones to tablets, our digital lives have sprawled. Having all our stuff spread across different devices complicates things, reducing the convenience of having that hub, that one place where all your digital interests reside. But there’s a silver lining – the cloud.  

According to Jobs, “iCloud keeps your important information and content up-to-date across all your devices. All of this happens automatically and wirelessly, and because it’s integrated into our apps you don’t need to think about it – it all just works.”

Convenience factors aside, iCloud and cloud computing in general present a different way of thinking about how we store our digital information. Cloud computing allows any web-friendly device to access the same pool of computing power, applications and files. Users can remotely store and access their personal files, the aforementioned music and pictures and videos and everything else. The data is centrally stored, so the user can access these files from a range of different devices, in any part of the world with Internet access. 

Bob Michaels, Senior Vice President for Tech & Telecom at Synovate, believes that cloud computing is here to stay. “The ability to buy the IT resources that you need and when you need them will continue to be attractive.  Advances in communication standardisation will serve to make the offerings of cloud computing even more attractive.”

This bodes well for businesses that are willing to take up the torch and utilise the technology. “At the basic level, clouds provide software, platforms or infrastructure as services. Software as a Service (SaaS) is in the lead, and in turn drives the need for other services. Any business that has changing needs is a suitable target in order to avoid overinvesting or falling short of capacity to meet customer demands,” says Michaels. 

One of the main concerns with using cloud computing is that it could be seen as a bit of a security risk. For many people, storing personal or commercially sensitive information online may seem unnerving. The risk is present, and where wireless cloud computing is concerned, the safety risk is increased due to the reduced security offered by wireless networks.

“Cloud services certainly require security measures, but no more than any other computing resource,” says Michaels. “Arguably, a central resource can more easily afford ‘industrial strength’ protections. It is not at all clear that a bullet-proofed cloud is more vulnerable than a notebook computer – containing corporate data – that can be taken or invaded.”

But do the benefits outweigh the potential risks? Cloud computing allows people from opposite ends of the globe to collaborate on projects together and without having to worry about who has the most recent documents, as everyone will have remote access to the same materials when and where they need. Michaels believes that future possibilities for the technology are driven by the limits of computing in general – and the ability of businesses to tap those capabilities as needed.

“At a more basic level, just as developing markets are immediately moving past landlines to mobile telephony and are starting with current phone technology, they have the ability to immediately make use of substantial computing capability without major infrastructure and software investment.”

A trend to keep an eye out for is cloud computing’s impact on mobile devices. As it stands, if you want an iPhone app, you have to first have a relationship with the mobile operator who carries the iPhone. The same applies to Blackberry apps. With mobile cloud computing applications, all you need is access to the web to access the application. Not to mention the perks of having access to remote storage from your phone.

Whether mobile or not, cloud computing is sure to make an increasingly small world even smaller, with greater sharing and access made available to more people every day. For now, this seems to be a cloud on the horizon worth watching.

 For more information, please contact Bob Michaels, Senior Vice President for Technology and Telecom for Synovate at bob.michaels@synovate.com