Do You Trust Cloud Computing?

In thinking about this issue, we posed the question on the social web aggregation service (and new-fangled discussion board), FriendFeed to see what people would say. Surprisingly, even on a site that tends to attract a lot of technology’s earliest adopters, the responses were mixed. When asked the question: “Do you trust the cloud?,” the majority of responses either came back as a flat-out “no” or as a longer explanation as to why their response was a “maybe” or a “sometimes.” In other words, some people trust the cloud here, but not there, or for this, but not that.

For many, the cloud is no more trustworthy, than a hard drive on their own machine. Despite the fact that web-based services, like Google’s Gmail, Calendar, and Picasa, live on some of Google’s hundreds of thousands of servers, there’s still the feeling that data you don’t have access to on your own machine is data you could lose.

Many respondents stated that they kept local backups of important data in addition to whatever data was also stored online. Others cited a combination of cloud plus local data as the ideal solution for cloud services. Says William Steward, “Evernote works as I know there’s a backup on two of my laptops, as well as the cloud.”

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