The Personal Cloud

When Steve Jobs introduced the iCloud last week, he brought new attention to the idea of the personal cloud. Apple is not the first to introduce a personal cloud system, and certainly won;t be the last. Google has been in the space for a couple of years. But people are waiting to see what Microsoft is going to do, and it will take another year to find that out.

The iCloud fills a need that is growing and that most people by now are familiar with. We have more than one computing device. They all create and store content. As smart phones in particular have grown in capability, more duplication of content has occurred. Tablets also lead to the same thing. In addition, when people are using one of their devices, they often want to access some content that is on one of the other devices. If it is handy, they can do that with through a USB port, although that is a bit bothersome. But the other device may not be handy, meaning they simply cannot access the content they want.

The answer is often has been to synchronize the devices, but that can also be a bother, since it has usually required a periodic manual process, so the devices are not always synchronized.

The cloud offers a solution to all this. Have some key apps on the cloud and store the data there. Then it can be accessed from anywhere there is internet access and on any device capable of accessing the internet. Then the users can gain access to their apps and data more easily. In addition, the cloud is more secure because if the device is lost, the related data is not - or need not be.

The personal cloud is a technique that has legs.