Imagine your PC and all of your mobile devices being in sync—all the time. Imagine being able to access all of your personal data at any given moment. Imagine having the ability to organize and mine data from any online source. Imagine being able to share that data—photos, movies, contacts, e-mail, documents, etc.—with your friends, family, and coworkers in an instant. This is what personal cloud computing promises to deliver.
Whether you realize it or not, you’re probably already using cloud-based services. Pretty much everyone with a computer has been. Gmail and Google Docs are two prime examples; we just don’t think of those services in those terms.
In essence, personal cloud computing means having every piece of data you need for every aspect of your life at your fingertips and ready for use. Data must be mobile, transferable, and instantly accessible. The key to enabling the portable and interactive you is the ability to synch up your data among your devices, as well as access to shared data. Shared data is the data we access online in any number of places, such as social networks, banks, blogs, newsrooms, paid communities, etc.
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Ultimately, your personal cloud—which includes everything from your address book and music collection to your reports and documents for work—will connect to the public cloud and other personal clouds. Everything connects. That means every place on the Internet you interact with, as well as every person you interact with can be connected. This includes your social networks, bank, university, workplace, family, friends—you name it.
Of course, you will determine what you show the public and what you keep private. Clusters of personal clouds will form new social networks that will likely have a lot more privacy settings than Facebook, especially if these clusters are family or business oriented. (Privacy will be a huge issue as personal clouds hit critical mass.)
Eventually, like the smart house in the TV series Eureka, your devices will learn about you and eventually intuit what you are doing, where you are going, and what you intend to do when you get there. Think of all this as helpful… not creepy.
This might all sound a bit like science fiction, but this is exactly where we’re headed with cloud computing. We’re not quite there yet, though. We’re all still creating our personal clouds.
So, what is involved in creating a personal cloud and what can you do with it right now? We’ll explain the basics here and, in our subsequent pieces, we’ll delve in to the specifics. We’ll take a look at the features within Windows 7 and Windows Live that will take you to the cloud—often without you even knowing it. So, check back for stories about Photo Fuse, Windows Live Messenger, Windows Live Mesh, SkyDrive, and more.
Microsoft Windows 7 and Your Personal Cloud
Technology insiders like to talk about the “consumerization of IT” and how such things as social networking are changing the business landscape. With its latest cloud-enabled product lineup, Microsoft seeks to flip this equation, banking heavily on the fact that a technology previously confined to corporations can be packaged to appeal to consumers.
Featured prominently alongside all of Microsoft’s lineup of products (Windows 7, Office 365, Windows Live, etc.) is its personal cloud.
“The personal cloud is a way to link several experiences together for end users,” said Steven Guggenheimer, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s OEM Division. “Technology is converging, with devices using similar operating systems, networks and radio stacks, but as technology converges, devices tend to diverge. The next challenge, then, is to figure out how to get content to behave consistently across a range of very different devices.”
Today’s cloud is very good at synching content across a single vendor’s devices. A recent Microsoft demo by corporate vice president Brad Brooks shows how Windows 7, Bing, Windows Phone 7, Windows Live, and other services interact to create a connected personal cloud.
In the demo, Brooks uses Bing as his search engine and pulls up one of his favorite bands, ZZ Top. When an entertainment button on the top of the Bing UI is clicked, the search returns relevant media items, including song snippets, upcoming concert dates, and one-click buying links to various music services, including Zune Marketplace, Apple iTunes, and Amazon MP3.
When Brooks downloads Sharp Dressed Man, the song is not just queued up in his PC-based Zune player, it’s automatically synched across his personal cloud, meaning that it’s synched up and ready to play, with no intervention from him, on his Windows Phone 7 device. He then shows photographs that he took with his phone and explains how they were immediately loaded in a Web-optimized format on SkyDrive, a Microsoft cloud storage service. (We’ll be detailing SkyDrive later in this Personal Cloud series.) Later on, once the phone is cradled in his home network, the photographs will be available throughout his home network, accessible on devices that range (eventually) from his PC to the TV to digital picture frames.
With the personal cloud in the background, consumers can have music hubs, photo hubs, productivity hubs, and more, from which they can access content consistently on whatever device they have, wherever they happen to be.
Personal Cloud and Your Work Life
Today’s cloud originated because the typical enterprise application was too bloated and required too much maintenance and support. They were also all-or-nothing affairs. You didn’t just pay for what you used. Rather, you paid for all of the features that came with the software, even if only a small percentage of the features were applicable to you.
When service providers offered a different delivery model, and, more importantly, different pricing models, companies realized that they no longer needed to pay for and manage heavy infrastructures for things like Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software.
What does this mean for the consumer in the workplace? We’re heading toward being able to data mine on the fly. What most consumers will notice is that it’s getting easier and easier to have a consistent experience whether you’re on your phone, PC, or some other Internet-enabled device. Smartphones already deliver this to a degree. Browser-based e-mail and popular e-mail programs like Outlook sync up easily with smartphones. Meanwhile, cloud services, such as Grooveshark, Facebook, and Twitter, all have mobile extensions.
But data mining, to some degree, is already easier, thanks to tools like those found in Windows 7. You can start implementing your own data mining system and synching up with other people’s data, with permission, of course. These are the first examples of interactive personal clouds coming to life.
There’s also analytics-driven data mining for Internet data and the ability to synch it up, as well as categorize it across all your devices. Say you’re researching cloud computing for a business meeting. You decide there’s an intersection between cloud computing, analytics, data mining, and business intelligence. You have, somewhere on your PC, articles about each of these subjects that you’ve collected over the years. With personal cloud tools, you could ask your hard drive for all of these articles, as well as those you find on the Internet, to be retrieved and regrouped under the title “personal cloud,” with subcategories and cross references, and all of this would be synched to all of your devices. Think about the number of hours, perhaps days, of busy work this could save. We’ll be looking at some of these cloud-based tools, including Windows Live Sync, Office Web Apps, and SkyDrive, later on in this series.
Let’s face facts: We’re moving to a cloud-based computing society—some of us faster than others. And it’s a fascinating prospect—once you get past all the jargon.
What Constitutes a Cloud Service?
The way vendors and analysts define cloud computing is all over the map. Some of the confusion is due to marketing hype, some to nitpicking technical disagreements. When everything has the label “cloud” on it, the term loses its meaning.
IDC came up with a handy checklist to determine whether or not something should be called a “cloud” service.
Key Cloud Services Attributes:
- Off-site, third-party provider
- Accessed via the Internet
- Minimal/no IT skills required to implement
- Provisioning = self-service requesting; near real-time deployment; dynamic and fine-grained scaling
- Pricing model = fine-grained, usage-based (at least available as an option)
- UI = browser and successors
- System interface = web services APIs
- Shared resources/common versions (customization “around” the shared services)
Original Source: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2372163,00.asp
