iCloud, You Cloud

On a day when IDC revised their PC sales figures in Europe down, on the US West Coast, Steve Jobs came off sick leave to unveil Apple's iCloud strategy. It's a sunny day for the industry.

As a dedicated iPad user the one fatal flaw I have been aware of is that the device is entirely dependent on contact with a PC or Mac running iTunes. From a static device, the iPad gets its OS updates, it gets backed up and can be restored (twice in my case after crashes when updating the OS - rule 1: never interrupt a Sync) only when in contact with a host PC or Mac running iTunes.

So will transferring that dependence into The Cloud, the iCloud no less, make the iPad any the better? Yes.

It means that I no longer have to be situated close to a PC or Mac to back up and interact with iTunes, the mother program. I will now be able to do this anywhere thanks to iCloud. And that goes for the iPod and iPhone too. In fact, Apple will automatically update all devices via synchronising from the iCloud. This means that if you add an event in your calendar, all devices will be updated to reflect it. Immediately, if you like. The same will go for documents, contacts and emails.

This is ace. I am a user of the excellent Evernote application, a far better version of MS's OneNote product. Automatically, via The Cloud, it updates my iPad 2, PC and Android phone with changes to every Note I write - immediately, automatically and wherever I am. It is, at last, one of the few programs to really make this possible. Apple now proposes this with all products.

Well you have to remember there is a Mac and a PC world so I would suggest we will not see ALL products reflecting this. But the proliferation of new devices has brought many new developers into play and we are at last getting the kind of innovation we last saw when the PC went open architecture for the first time. It does mean that the rich software companies will gobble up small players as we have seen in the past but there is a hope that we no longer all have to adhere solely to Microsoft's agenda.

And that's good news for us all as they have stifled the stuffing out of the application market on PCs. The world of Mac and Android is where the innovation has been.

The iCloud is a great step forward and what it illustrates is the massive benefit that The Cloud can bring. All devices synchronised, everywhere.

Now isn't that a reason to get excited?

The Cloud Can Handle it

Hold onto your hats. Digital data will have grown by 44 fold by the end of the decade, according to IDC.

To size that up, it is a walloping 35 zettabytes. Yes, I had to look it up too - that's 35 BILLION terabytes. The bulk of this data will be contained in emails and website content - or unstructured data not retrievable by normal database querying methods, as the experts put it. In fact 90% of it will exist in this format.

Under normal circumstances, this incredible growth would be matched in by the growth in IT staff. Aha, this is where The Cloud comes into play. While data may grow by 44 fold, IT staff numbers will grow by a mere 47% - making enormous leaps in productivity.

Given SMEs will be contributing massively to this data growth, how on earth can they possibly keep pace with this growth in data in terms of cost of storage? This is where the scalability of The Cloud helps. By putting the data and its management into The Cloud, small firms can ditch legacy equipment and use the scalability of The Cloud to decrease the operating costs over time.

With disparate new tools like tablets and smartphones there will be a growing need to consolidate and synchronise data. Loads more Apps will mean staff will be creating more data in different places than ever before.

Let me give you a good example of a decent application for business. I use Evernote (right now, in fact). Similar but more flexible and easier to use than MS OneNote, Evernote allows me to create, amend and share documents across multiple platforms like my PC, IPad and smartphone by consolidating and synchronising data in The Cloud. It was the best £27 I have spent in ages.

Such applications are going to help keep that data growth in check but it will be clever companies who embrace The Cloud that can get similar approaches to help keep the cost of storage and management of data down over time.

Gartner reckon that that in 2011 some 65% of organisations will have started or completed moving their in-house data onto The Cloud, albeit what is known as The Private Cloud - secured private storage areas off premise and sharing in similar scalable benefits as The Public Cloud gives.

See, The Cloud doesn't mean you can't keep 'Blue Sky Thinking'.