I wrote a blog post yesterday about my move to the cloud. It has gotten 234 comments so far and another 49 on Hacker News. That's a lot of discussion about something that is fairly commonplace these days.
It's pretty clear from reading the comments on both places that moving to the cloud is something many have done, many more are doing, and a few are resisting. It's also clear to me that it is the future.
There are two issues that were raised again and again about the cloud, reliability and security. The first, to me, is a non issue for the most part. I believe that services will go down occasionally. We sync our critical data in the cloud to a machine somewhere so that if the service is down we can still operate. And if you look at most service failures, they don't last more than a day or two at most. I think the reliability issue is manageable with approaches we have right now. And I think service reliability will improve. That said, backing up your data in the cloud is a good idea. One company whose name came up a fair bit in the comments is Backupify. Antoher is Spanning Backup.
The security issue is much more complicated. I'm not a security expert and have not invested in security even though it has been one of the best investment sectors over time. But it is pretty clear to me that there is a huge security opportunity with this mass movement to the cloud. Entrepreneurs and investors are focused there already and I'm pretty sure there are going to be some really big companies built in cloud security.
The cloud is one of the four megatrends I wrote about recently. And its a big one with implications all over the technology sector and society at large. I guess that's why we got all the discussion yesterday.
