Living on a cloud

Has your laptop ever been stolen, lost or damaged so you lost your data?  Once when I was writing my thesis the hard drive of my computer was stolen. Of course I had a backup, but it was several days old and I lost some data. What if your house burns down and you lose all your files, pictures, everything even the backups! One option would be to store backups in a bank locker, however that is quite stressful, going to the bank every week or so.  USB sticks are handy, but easy to lose, what about going to a meeting and losing your usb-stick with the powerpoint file? CD-ROM disk are clumsy, their main use is for backup and distribution.

Cloud computing and storage has, at least partly solved our problem, it means that our data is copied to some large server, somewhere in a a controlled and safe environment. The data can be accessed from anywhere on the internet,by you or the people you give permission to. The general idea is that our data follows us through our everyday life and is at our fingertips in our mobile devices.  Pictures taken with your mobile telephone can be stored directly to the cloud server and hence you do not need to worry about your phone getting lost or broken. Remember, phones can be replaced, pictures not.

Now there are already many cloud services on the market, Dropbox, ICloud, GoogleDocuments and Microsoft's SkyDrive. the ICloud on the IOS operating system is limited to Apple devices and as there is no file structure, pictures can not be viewed using a web browser. Dropbox functions quite well, is work on both Apple and Microsoft devices, and is very simple to use, one of my favorites.

Now Nokia has come with a new range of Windows phones, the Lumia series, and it seems that for example the Lumia 800 has no port for additional memory, there is 16 Gb on boards, so what if? Well I was thinking about that, when I cam across the fact that the Lumia comes with SkyDrive, and therefore there is little use for storing data on the phone itself, except perhaps abroad, where access to the internet can be limited or expensive..

I have been experimenting with different cloud systems the last few months and it seems to work fine, I have not used my usb memory  only occasionally, and my data is always were I need it. Also the problem of finding the latest version has been eliminated.

There are of course some issues, as always, security, is the data safe and is your privacy garanteed?
I think that to be on the safe side, I would not store company trade secrets on a public cloud server, ther are enterprise cloud systems available for that. But for the normal file, holiday pictures and the like I think it is the way to go.

I will buy a new Nokia Lumia Windows phone shortly and will start to experiment with the SkyDrive concept to store mobile data on the go. I only need to choose between the model 800 and 900 :).
In the mean time I have opened a new Windows Live account to investigate the SkyDrive concept.

There is also an SkyDrive App available for IPhone and IPad, which is interesting, as Microsoft and Apple are competing ecosystems.

See also : SkyDrive

Nokia Lumia 800

Not safe at all!

It seems that the IOS operating system for IPad and IPhone has vulnerabilities after all. Of course we know, or should know that these devices track us all day and everywhere.  Yesterday I checked software from ESRI showing aerial images, it pointed exactly to the spot I was sitting in my house, well it is not secret, but it raises questions.  Of course these programs ask you for permission to use your GPS-position, but still, can one rely on these promises?

Now it seems that malicious software can(and has) been available through the Apple Appstore, raising more questions, about the ability of Apple to really check all these hundreds of thousands of programs.  Perhaps the fact that we know for certain that the Windows environment is unsafe it makes us more aware and everybody can protect himself using anti-virus software and fire-walls. 

BBC News link

Now there are also apps for the IPad and IPhone which just grab your private data, just by “accident”, Path and Hipster applications swipe and copy your address book contents and store them on a server, why?

BBC News link

The claim it was by accident, but how many other applications look into your private life, monitor your behavior and store the data for some reason. It is clear that most data is not sensitive and has little value to anyone. But I would conclude that sensitive and personal information is better not stored on and IPad or IPhone, just to be safe. For some notes see the following business security overview. 

Apple security overview

However all the passcodes and network encryption is of little use if the applications steal the data?  It seems there is a price to pay for being 24 hours ad day online in a global network. Remember that a harmless joke on Twitter or Facebook can be interpreted incorrectly by employers or government as the following link shows 

BBC News

Latest:
** Social apps 'harvest user data' **
Twitter admits copying entire address books from smartphones and storing the data on its servers, often without customers' knowledge. 

BBC 16-02