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My girlfriend has just emailed me to ask me my advice about Cloud Training for around 15-20 people. I can tell you that it took all my willpower to resist the temptation to send her the link to the local DZs website. That's a Drop Zone (place where sky divers go) for those who were wondering. Now I know exactly what my partner was after, but this is something that is beginning to irritate me. I'm referring to the increasingly popular (and unjustified) practice of giving something a different name when it already has a perfectly good one that most people already know and are comfortable with.
I'll diverge a little bit here because there's something else that irritates me and I just used one, the multitude of acronyms that we have to understand these days. Coming from an IT background I get these all the time and take them in my stride, however, I can fully appreciate that some people just don't get them and would prefer to have plain old English. I agree. In fact sometimes I find them a bit confusing and annoying myself.
Back to the original gripe. Since when did the Internet become The Cloud? Clouds were around before computers. Clouds are these great fluffy things in the sky, sometimes they're dark and grey and they might rain on you, or if you're lucky they'll dump enough snow on you so that you can't get to work! But nevertheless, they're in the sky and they don't understand binary, have need assembly language, machine code and registers. As it happens, most computer studies graduates haven't got a clue about these things either these days. I think most of the important subjects have probably been replaced by Facebook! Anyway, these lovely things in the sky have nothing to do with the Internet.
I've heard these terms batted around quite a bit on technology blogs these days. They're always talking about cloud this, cloud that, cloud computing, you're data is stored in the cloud etc. etc. By the way, if you do a search on Google for "cloud", guess what comes up first? Nope, it's not a description of cumulus or nimbus cllouds, it's a Cloud Computing wikipedia page. If you start typing "cloud stra" on the Google search page, guess what comes up? A whole load of pages about "cloud strategy", not the information about Stratus Clouds as I'd expected.
The thing is, calling it "The Cloud" is just going to confuse a lot of people, mainly less computer literate or the slightly older ones. We all know what The Internet is and we all know what clouds are so let's just leave it at that please. Stop dreaming up new and confusing names for things just for the sake of it.
By: Keep it simple
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The subscriber below with his nickname "Cloud Vapourisation: Vanish into thin air" got it perfectly right. Upload your data to the cloud and you will permanently lose control of it. When you wish to remove it you will never be able to ensure it has actually been deleted, and of course, it may vanish into thin air at any time. It will enable hackers to access your data 24 hours a day for as long as the remote server is on air, and switching you computer off, and even removing your hard drive will provide you no protection whatsoever.
Microsoft, Google, Apple and any other providers who operate the servers will have ensured that their conditions of service will absolve them of any responsibility for loss or misuse of you data and their legal liability to compensate you for any damage you may suffer.
Boring!!
Nick