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Friday, October 8, 2010

Hybrid Cloud

In my last post, I talked about how the loss of my internet connection rendered the cloud useless. Today I want to give you an idea of the alternative to the cloud, where a loss of internet connection does not mean total loss of data access. The alternative is a hybrid solution where your data is stored in the cloud, but with an automated and seamless local cache. This solution offers the best of both worlds; You get the benefits of cloud storage, security, and management, and you also get the benefits of a local storage such as speed and offline availability.


Such a solution does exist, I'm currently reviewing a product that does all this and some more. I have not finished reviewing and don't have enough information to share yet, but I'm working on it. The company offering the solution gives 1 year free for anyone blogging or reviewing their product, I hope they give this year before anything's written, I would like to try it for some time before writing about it.

I won't tell you which company, but I will hint that it's an Australian company.

See ya next time, when I will have some more information on a great hybrid cloud/local solution.

Monday, October 4, 2010

Cloud Without Net

For the last few weeks, I've been suffering from either complete loss of net connection, or a very slow connection(64Kbs). Yes 64 Kilo bits, not bytes, per second. I wonder which is worse, complete loss or the slow net? I also wonder how life in the cloud can exist with such connectivity. Well, it can't.


In order to live in the cloud, you need to have a fast, consistent connection. Being without such a connection, you're kind of like someone who made a backup on an external hard drive, forgot it at home and went to work. He can still access the data, but he'd have to go home and get it. Very slow process. Very impractical. This is how it is in developing countries, where the net is slow, not always available, and/or has a download limit. I have a 10 gig/month limit which I finished on the 13th of the month. This is what caused the speed to drop from 2.4 Mbs to 64Kbs. Huge drop from cloud #9 to earth. Then I completely lost the connection due to an error at the ISP.

Loss of connection meant loss of everything. I became very dependent on Google Docs and Blogger. I find it very convenient to write on Google Docs, and I have a lot of things on Docs, with no local backup. So when the net was lost, I had no way to continue writing or reviewing my work. In order not to be completely out of touch with my documents, I will have to make local backups, since my ISP might throw another problem any time without notice. I consider this a slap in the face since I'm trying to promote the idea of The Cloud.

I have to admit, for the time being, the cloud is for developed countries, but for developing countries, I think in order to benefit from the cloud, it would have to be an intranet cloud. Developing countries will have to wait a few more years to benefit from the full internet cloud.