Security concerns cast shadow over cloud's future

Chances are you've already got your head in the clouds, and if Google has its way, you'll trust even more of your life to the digital cumulus.

The next-generation internet speeds that Google promises for the Kansas City market could tempt people to store more of their virtual lives - music collections, family photo albums, software applications - on the "cloud" rather than in their own computers.

"Google wants your internet experience to be through one of its products, so you'll see more of its ads," said Josh Olson, a technology industry analyst at Edward Jones & Co.

"For those ads to work, they need to have traffic. They want you in their cloud."

That's a good part of the reason Google plans to string fibre-optic cable to nearly every home and business in Kansas City and the neighboring Kansas City, Kanas. It's an express elevator to the internet cloud.

And what's the cloud? It's anything that's kept on the internet rather than on your computer's hard drive.

Like anything that has to do with technology, the cloud brings all the possibilities of convenience and worries about security.

Technologists regularly say the cloud is to your data what the bank is to your money. Keep the cash in a safe in your basement, and it's probably secure. Put it in the bank, and you surrender security to somebody else in return for interest and the convenience that comes with checking and credit cards and ATMs.

Lock your data up on a hard drive, and it's hard for anyone to steal your secrets. Put them in ani inernet vault on the cloud, and there's a risk that some thief might hack your stuff.

But for convenience, the cloud backs up your virtual goodies in case your home computer breaks down. As long as you've got the internet, you've got access to all your digital stuff wherever you are.

Cloud computing stores your digital belongings on remote computer servers rather than on your own hardware. That means you don't have to buy as much physical storage.

In the end, because the servers are shared and used to fuller capacity, it's a cheaper way to store things.

For years the cloud has been a tech industry buzzword, implying some cyber trend that might alter how we put the internet to work.

We've gradually shifted our electronic valuables to the cloud. Gartner Research estimates worldwide spending on cloud computing neared $US70 billion last year, almost two-thirds of that in North America.

The trend has been gradual and, at least from the consumer's view, not quite revolutionary.

Apple recently announced plans for its iCloud, a way to use the internet to sync your iPod with your MacBook and your iPhone and the rest of your iStuff. If you have a song or a photo on one device, it will automatically show up on them all.

That comes as more and more of what we do online has already migrated to the cloud.

Google, for instance, offers an entire suite of free programs from spreadsheets (think Microsoft Excel), to word processing (think Microsoft Word), to slide show presentations (think Microsoft PowerPoint) available to anyone with an internet connection.

In 2010, Microsoft responded with its own free set of online Office programs.

Without trying very hard, you've probably been floating on the cloud for a while. If you've used an email account from Gmail or Yahoo or Hotmail, you've trusted part of your life to the cloud. Likewise, if you listen to music on Pandora, you've tapped into its possibilities. What is YouTube (another Google property) if not a cloud depository of video?

Now the jump to the clouds is about to become more profound. The Google Fibre project could shift use of the cloud to another gear.

Consider the fledgling Google Music programme. It offers the possibility of delivering all your music and playlists to any gadget, anywhere that can connect to the internet.

But here's the bummer: First you must upload all of your music to Google's cloud. For somebody with several thousand songs in a library, shifting all those files to the cloud could take days on a typical internet connection.

But with the 1 gigabit-per-second upload speeds that Google says it will bring to town, a day's chore takes less than an hour.