The Future of Woz and Cloud Problems

Any new technology that is profoundly, or even remotely, popular will always have people who love it and people who hate it. Often, the opinion of experts in the same field is so widely varied that normal users are left wondering who to trust. One such debate that rages, almost daily in some circles, is over the cloud. One well-known tech guru has recently said he’s worried about the cloud.

Mike Daisey is an American monologist who did a show about Apple’s production plant (FOXCONN) in Shenzhen, China that turned out to contain false facts. In August he updated his show and even brought on a special guest, Steve Wozniak (Woz), Co-founder of Apple.

On the show, Woz talked about many things, but one of the topics resonated with the tech crowd. The topic was the security of the cloud and ownership of data and files within it. Woz stated, in no uncertain terms, that, “there are going to be a lot of horrible problems in the next five years.”

He went on to explain that the reason he felt the next few years will be tough is due to ownership of information stored in the cloud. He explained, “a lot of people feel, ‘oh, everything is really on my computer’, but I say the more we transfer everything onto the web, onto the cloud, the less we’re going to have control over it…I really worry about everything going to the cloud.”

Woz and other critics of the cloud are worried about who really owns your personal information in the cloud, and how much actual control you have over data stored on a cloud provider’s servers – aka. the cloud. The underlying issue around this reservation is the question of what will happen to all of your data if there is a massive breakdown at remote storage locations. Some users had a recent glimpse into this possibility when Amazon’s data center was struck by lightning causing cloud services like Pinterest and Instagram to be unavailable for hours. Despite the fact that the issue was fairly small, groups of people were mad at not being able to access their data.

Users may be reserved in fully trusting cloud solutions and the companies offering them but the cloud is quickly becoming a backbone to many business oriented solutions. Chances are, you are using at least one cloud service right now. Many IT companies believe that the cloud is the way to go and strive to take steps to ensure ownership of stored information is as clear as possible.

What are your thoughts on this issue? Are you worried about cloud solutions or do you embrace them? Let us know.