Syncing to the Cloud - What For?

In previous posts I've taken a look at using cloud computing services for fun and profit. Today I'd like to look at the whole notion of cloud computing, and exactly why we, as end users might want to use it.

(For those who aren't up to speed, "cloud computing" is a term used to describe services that store your files and other data on a remote server, and allow you to access it via the Internet)

Probably the biggest convenience-related aspect of cloud services is that all your different devices have the same data all the time.

"But I don't have lots of devices!" I hear you say. Maybe so. But if you have a computer for work, another for home and a cellphone, that's already three devices with data to be synchronized. If you're not syncing them directly, then you're probably doing it manually, by taking a phone number in your work address book, entering it into your phone's contact list, and then saving it again on your home computer. Sound familiar?

In the old days (like three years ago) your computer acted as the central hub for all the syncing. If you were syncing at all, your syncing situation probably looked something like this:

With your main computer in the middle, and all your other devices syncing off it. If you had a second computer, you would have to sync via a third-party cloud service, like Microsoft Exchange or something to keep your stuff updated.

But here's a hypothetical situation (that you may actually have come across): let's say you have a meeting set up on your second computer. While you're sitting at that computer, you change a detail (say the venue). A few minutes later you need to change another detail (say the time), but all you have with you is your cellphone, so you update it on your phone's calender.

So now what's happened? The second computer accepted the change and synced it up to Exchange. Exchange then sent the change to your main computer. So you go home that evening and sync your phone with your main computer... the computer tries to update the event in your phone's calendar, but it sees there's already a change in your phone's calendar (the time is different). It doesn't know how to resolve the conflict, so it creates a duplicate event. So now all your devices have two copies of this meeting, one with a changed time, the other with a changed venue. Weeks later, on the day of the meeting, how do you know which is the correct one?

There are three problems with this picture:

1. There are too many steps between different devices. More than one step leaves you open to errors.

2. Too many of the syncs have to be activated manually, usually by you actually plugging one device into another and pushing a button to make it happen. This means that the syncing between two devices at opposite ends of the chain could take hours or even days.

3. Everything is dependent on the Main Computer. If that gets stolen or damaged, the whole process breaks down, and you have to start again from scratch!

But everything's changed now. With the right devices and cloud-based services, you can now have a picture that looks more like this:

With all your devices syncing directly with the cloud, your central storage location is safely protected by a cloud services company. All your devices can sync directly with the cloud, updating it and each other via the Internet, and in real time! You don't even have to push a button to make the sync happen anymore (unless you want to) - as long as they're connected to the Internet, these things all sync themselves!

Plus you can add or take away devices as you see fit. Laptop gets stolen? No problem: just get a new one and carry on where you left off. Want to sync up your tablet computer, smart TV or car? No problem: just log them into your account and away they go.

And it's not limited to just calendars and contact lists anymore. Any of your content: documents, presentations, photos, videos, music, podcasts you name it! Even certain applications can be synced to the cloud!

In future posts we'll look at exactly how to get syncing set up between your devices and the cloud. Don't be scared though, it's a lot easier than it sounds. And keeping organised will be so much easier when you're there.

Email in the Cloud

A few weeks ago I wrote about using cloud-based backups.

(Just to bring you up to speed: cloud-based services are tools that run via the Internet on a server hosted by somebody else like Google or DropBox)

Today we'll be looking at another very important tool that we should consider moving into the cloud: email.

Now some people may be a little confused about that. After all, email is part of the Internet right? Doesn't that mean it's already in the cloud?

Well yes, kind of, but not always.

If you're using your company email account, odds are it's not cloud-based. Most medium to large companies keep their own email server which runs on their local IT network. If you pop down and visit the boys in IT, they could probably show you the email server. When you access your work email from inside your office, you're probably accessing it over the local network, not the Internet.

Your email server probably looks like this

There are some good reasons for doing it this way, mostly so that your email server (which is probably running Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Domino or something similar) can talk directly to the other servers on your network and exchange information with them freely.

If you use the email account your Internet service provider (ISP) gave you, that's not quite cloud-based either. Their email server will likely sit in a server room with all their other various servers. When you connect to that server, you're doing it through your service provider's network, not technically through the Internet.

In both these cases if you've set up your laptop or smartphone to connect to that email account, that connection will generally happen over the Internet, so I suppose you could say that they're cloud-based in a way, but that's not really the kind of thing we're talking about here.

So What Are We Talking About?

If you've been on the Internet for a while, in that time you've probably come across (and maybe even used) two services: Hotmail and Gmail. They are the leading cloud-based email providers. In both cases you can only connect to these services via the Internet, and therefore the cloud.

But Why Would I Want That?

One thing you've probably noticed with your work or ISP email service is that there tends to be a fair amount of down-time. It may go down for hours, even days at a time during which you're stuck without email. The reason for that is that your company or ISP has a relatively small staff of engineers and technicians, and they're tasked with keeping an eye on a bunch of different servers at the same time. Not only that, but they often can't afford "fail-over" servers (backup servers that take over immediately if the main server goes down). So when there's a problem, you usually have to wait for those techies to fix it, which will sometimes take a while.

Proper cloud-based mail providers aren't limited by that. Gmail and Hotmail have colossal server farms dedicated to nothing but provide their email service. If one server, or even one whole datacentre, goes down, there are others that pick up the slack and keep providing the service with little or no interruption to you.

The redundancy these guys use is so robust that it takes a pretty rare and severe problem to cause any real interruption of the service. These things do happen, but not often. In 2010 Gmail recorded an average of 7 minutes' down time per month. Just to give you an idea, that's 46 times more reliable than your average Microsoft Exchange server.

Cloud Storage

As is the case with cloud-based backup tools, cloud-based email stores all of your old emails on their server, which means you can access it from any computer. And since Hotmail and Gmail offer you quite a lot of storage space, you can keep a much longer history of emails than you could with your corporate or ISP email account. So much so that you will probably never have to delete an email (Gmail didn't even have a delete function at first... they only introduced it later because the users really wanted it).

Gmail in particular puts that extra server capacity to work in a number of ways for you, one of which is the ability to send much larger attachments than with other services. You can now send attachments up to 25MB in size via Gmail (for context, your average Word document is less than 1MB).

But I Like Outlook!

If you've been using Microsoft Outlook or some equivalent email application for a long time, you've probably grown accustomed to it. Although the web interfaces for Gmail and Hotmail are quite intuitive, some people just don't like having to change to a new application to do the same old thing.

Fortunately both Gmail and Hotmail allow you to connect up to your Outlook or other email clients, so you can use your email the way you've always done it and still be working in the cloud! Of course there are limitations - you'll still need to log into the Gmail or Hotmail website to search your archives for very old messages, but you probably won't need to do that often anyway.

(Connecting your Gmail or Hotmail to Outlook can be a bit tricky. Although there are helpful guides on how to do it, you might want to ask your local IT-savvy person to help you with it.)

But I Have Too Many Email Accounts!

If you've been online for a while, odds are you've accumulated quite a few different email accounts over the years, many of which you might still be using. One of the advantages of an application like Microsoft Outlook is that it lets you plug in a number of separate email accounts into one application.

Fortunately Gmail lets you do the same thing. Gmail has connectors that let you link up to your Yahoo Mail account, and both Gmail and Hotmail have a built-in POP3 client (POP3 is an email protocol that's supported by most email servers) that let you pull your various different email accounts into your Gmail or Hotmail Inbox and archive. Unfortunately they don't yet support Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Domino email accounts - for those you'll still need to use your corporate software.

But I Use Email on my Smartphone!

Gmail for Android

No problem. Most smartphones will allow you to connect multiple email accounts just like Outlook does, so you can use Gmail or Hotmail alongside your work email account on the same device.

In addition, most smartphones also have Gmail and Hotmail apps available that allow you to send and receive emails, as well as search your vast archive right on your mobile device.

So How Much Does All This Cost?

Nothing. That's right, it's free. You "pay" for the service by looking at the ads on the page, but you don't even have to buy anything.

Both Hotmail and Gmail have corporate equivalents that allow you to have your whole company, school or other organisation using cloud-based email instead of a local server - and those generally aren't free. But they are competitively priced, and worth considering if your company has had trouble keeping its local email server up.

Head in the Clouds

On this blog and elsewhere, you've probably come across the term "cloud computing". If you're not familiar with system architecture, the term is rather obscure... and as we know, obscurity can be a bit scary.

But fear not. Not only is cloud computing not all that scary, but it's something you could be using to your benefit!

What Is It?

The term "cloud computing" is a reference to an old practice in system architecture design... in the design documents, a cloud symbol has been traditionally used to represent the Internet. So, in essence, cloud computing is Internet computing, where the kinds of work that is traditionally done by your own computer instead happens on some anonymous server somewhere on the Internet.

Another, more familiar, term for cloud computing is "hosted services", where your data and/or software is physically hosted by another company on your behalf.

What's It For?

Just about anything really. Cloud computing refers to the way your data and software work, but what you use that data and software for is up to you. These days, you can do just about anything in a cloud-based service that you can do with normal software, although not everyone is ready to make the full transition yet.

Let's look at one of the most common uses for cloud computing: backups.

Backing Up to the Cloud

As anyone who has ever lost data can tell you, one of the most important bits of your technology infrastructure is the ability to create and access backups. In case your computer crashes or gets stolen, you still need access to your important stuff.

External Hard Drive

A popular solution to this problem is an external hard drive: a shiny box sitting next to your computer where you can manually save copies of your files. But what if someone breaks into your office and steals your computer? What's stopping them from stealing your hard drive too?

Another common solution is to have a backup server somewhere on your network, usually sitting with the boys in IT downstairs. You might be able to access a shared drive where you can store copies of your documents in case something happens to your machine. But what if your office building burns down with both your computer and the backup server inside it?

A better option, surely, would be to save your backups somewhere far away, but still easy to get to. And that's what cloud-based backups do: you upload your files (either manually or automatically) to a server somewhere in the cloud. If something happens to your computer, you can just log into your account from another computer and be up and working again in minutes!

But what if something happens to the cloud server? Well, that's not your problem. That server has its own team of engineers and technicians whose job it is to worry about exactly that. They manage backups of your backups, disaster recovery plans and rollover servers on your behalf, so that you don't have to. Even if the worst happens, odds are the only impact on you will be that their service might be unavailable for a few minutes.

Outsource the Risk

And therein lies the biggest advantage to cloud computing: the cloud guys manage the risk so you don't have to. All you need to do is pay the subscription fee (if there is one) and they'll handle all the hard work. As long as you've got an Internet connection, your stuff will be working.

For personal use, I use DropBox for my cloud-based backups. It creates a folder on your computer, and any files you put in the folder are automatically uploaded to the cloud. If you install DropBox on another computer, it downloads all those files to that computer and then keeps them synced. There are even apps that allow you to access your DropBox from your smartphone, and it gives you the ability to share files and folders with your friends or with the Internet. All for free (or for a modest fee if you need more space).

There are also cloud-based backups available for more specific uses: Picasa Web Albums allows you to backup and share your photos, Evernote keeps a copy of your notes (including audio and photographic notes) in the cloud and so on. And there are plenty others to choose from.

Most cloud-based backup services offer a free service intended for personal use, as well as an upgraded paid-version (with more space, added features and that sort of thing) for more active users or corporates.

If you haven't already got yourself a backup space in the cloud, what are you waiting for? Go!