Richard Stallman Talking at Pittsburgh University in 2010
Stallman believes that the cloud computing boom is mere hype – with the computing industry relabeling everything being done already as “cloud” – and to some extent, we can see what he means.
However – in terms of particular services, we believe with proper encryption – that the idea of backing up data “to the cloud” – makes perfect sense – because a backup is a disaster recovery plan… disasters can be as minor as a server burning up – or an entire building burning down – to as major region-wide disaster such as an earthquake or tsunami… a local backup to DVD of your outlook files will do you no good in the event that your entire building collapses, or is washed away by a 50 foot tall ocean wave.
In terms of security – cloud refers to using the infrastructure and computing power, plus centralized “intelligence” and knoweldgebase of a provider to determine if something is a threat – cloud scanning of your email for previously unknown threats is the direction that all security vendors are going – and it makes perfect sense. Almost ZERO spam filtering engines don’t make use of central databases, which are updated continuously to provide “black lists” – a database of known spam source servers – these are used as a “first glance” to check that the server sending the email is not a compromised server, or a spammer with millions of emails per day being sent from their network.. this kind of cloud intelligence service has been in use for many years – it was and remains, a cloud service.
Federated cloud and content distribution networks are another perfectly good example of cloud computer using under-used resources such as disk, ram and CPU cycles – these types of cloud computer projects can allow end of life computers to have some useful purpose, instead of being recycled or worse still – becoming landfill. It also allows small companies access to services which have previously been reserved by cost for larger entities – even a mere 2 years ago, the concept of using a content distribution system was something that only large companies such as Amazon, Google, IBM etc could utilize. Today, using cloud infrastructure managed by onApp – or CloudFlare – these services can be added to even a modest website, such as any small mom+pop shop.
Taken in the context of 2008, we have to agree that “cloud” was a buzzword in search of a home – but in early to mid 2013, cloud computing has begun to plant roots – technology that is now considered mainstream – such as email block-lists, spam filtering, antivirus and cloud backup.
Richard – we appreciate everything you have done for our industry – but we have to disagree with your assumptions and statement that the entire cloud industry is “stupidity” – perhaps in 2008 your statement had some validity – but not much.