The Cloud is Real

It’s a horrible industry buzzword with little substance behind it, but the cloud is really cool. For example, I rely heavily on the cloud for pretty much everything. For a while, myself and others harped on the cloud for a lot of different reasons, and some of those reasons are still valid reasons to stay away from parts of the cloud.

But, now I am a solid user of two services that I think handle 85% of the things that people use a centralized server in an office for. Dropbox and Google Apps Premiere Edition. Why? Because Google Apps still lets me use a thick client (Outlook and iPhone) which keep local copies of all my mail, calendars and contacts. This way, if there’s a cloud failure or connectivity issue I can still continue to compose emails and work with the emails that came in before the failure. I still have my archives, and I still have my calendar and contact data.

Even if I highly relied on email, this system would allow me to continue to function with only a delay on incoming and outgoing mail. Since Google isn’t known for having super long outages anyway, this is an acceptable compromise over maintaining a personal mail server — especially when you consider the cost. Besides, when Google’s cloud is down it’s not hard to find out. If an internal mail server goes down, the only way someone else is going to find out is via an NDR (Non-Delivery Reciept) usually not sent out for days. And if your email can’t wait a few hours or even a day or so, you’re doing it wrong.

Now, what about Dropbox? Well, Dropbox is cool because it lets me store all kinds of files that wouldn’t really fit into the cloud well. For example, I have a few scripts that I use for work that I want to be available to me even if my comptuer crashes. I also have some documents that would be hard to convert to a useful Google Docs format. I also keep a lot of images and notepad files in there. So what makes it so great? Well, Dropbox is capable of storing a ton of data on the cloud and I don’t have a super fast Internet connection (1.5 Mbps DSL), so I don’t want syncs to new computers to take days. Dropbox has a feature called LAN Sync that is really cool. It allows my computers to sync new and changed files between each other over the Local Network whenever they’re connected to it. This means between my desktop and laptops data only goes between home and the cloud once.

Also, since the Dropbox is replicated, I always have the latest version of the files on my computer. So I don’t need to worry about a Dropbox issue, if they have a server outage I will still have the local copies to work on and when the cloud comes back up they will re-sync and everyone can be happy again.