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Last Friday somebody tried to steal my iPhone in the subway. That was a good thing in a way, since this is what inspired the idea for this post.

My main computer nowadays is my iPhone. This phone is not valuable in itself. It is just a stupid piece of hardware. It becomes valuable when you connect it to the internet. It is the gateway to all my information which is stored online. I use a plethora of online services to store all my data except for music and movies.

Isn’t that great? Wherever and wherever I am, I can summon a piece of information from the cloud for any purpose. Whether it is to check a friend’s status or check a car bill I paid a year ago. Even more interesting, is that I don’t even have to check when something happens, I automatically receive a notification.

In this post, I would like to raise your awareness on two topics: Cloud Computing and Digital Assets.

Cloud Computing

What is it?

Cloud computing describes computation, software, data access, and storage services that do not require end-user knowledge of the physical location and configuration of the system that delivers the services. In a word, the internet as we know it. Since everything is performed in the cloud, our desktop computers become dumb terminals.

How did it change our lives?

Cloud computing changed our lives drastically over the last two decades with the internet becoming mainstream. The way we perform daily tasks such as banking, buying and selling stuff, doing business or communicating with people is far from they way we did it when I was a child.

New devices appeared such as smart phones and laptops, to name a few. Where there used to be cables, now there is nothing. We used to store our data in file cabinets. Now our data spreads on every server of the planet. We used to live in quiet neighbourhoods. Now, everyone can walk by my house from the comfort of their living room.

It changed the nature of almost every job from the knowledge workers to the farmers. It even put the paper media industry on the brink, almost killing it altogether.

Is it just the flavour of the month?

Cloud computing is definitely here to stay. If one thing, it only grows bigger. Now, even cars are online. People living thousands of miles away can now communicate and share. Think only of Facebook and Twitter. These are tools that gave a voice the masses where there used to be a silent crowd. Think of what happened in Egypt lately… Whether we like it or not, we better get to understand it. So we can benefit from it.

Digital Assets

Who owns your files?

Of course it is you. But is it really true? If you store you digital assets yourself, this is not an issue. But when you put your content on a server somewhere, remember that a 3rd party is controlling the access to your data. That 3rd party is not public nor is it a public benefactor in any way. It is a business and it is there to make money. As a business, it can also go bankrupt or change vocation over time. Do you remember AOL, Compuserve, MySpace? The market place is full of example like these.

Are your assets eternal?

If they are digital, that means that are virtual, therefore eternal, right? Well… Let’s have a closer look at it. Whether you store your information on your computer or in the cloud. It ends being stored on a hard drive. Something, that have mobile parts it. The average life span of is 3 to 5 years at best. This is even worst for other medias. In the end your information is not eternal, unless someone takes care of putting it on another media. Which means manipulation of your data in some ways, and of course that means it costs money.

Are your assets secure?

Let’s pretend for a moment that our digital assets are eternal. Now comes another threat to it. Security. How secure how your assets? If you store your assets on your local computer then you consider that your computer may be stolen. Your house can burn in a fire and so on. If your assets are stored in the cloud, mostly you are using a user name/password combination to restrict the access to your data. Remember that even the most secure of logins can be broken.

So as you can see, cloud computing freed us from the desktop and allowed us to be more productive, more connected than ever before. But as with everything, there is some issues to consider.

I hope that I was successful in raising your awareness on all the possibilities the cloud computing has to offer as well as the issues to consider about your digital assets.