Dean Evans - Freelance Writer

Back in October 2008, Microsoft announced its ‘Windows in the cloud’ strategy – Windows Azure. The sober description of Microsoft’s new push into web computing is that its Azure platform will give its customers “the power of choice to deploy applications in cloud-based internet services or through on-premises servers”.

The more exciting definition is that Azure will offer lightweight versions of Word, Excel, OneNote and PowerPoint online.

A turning point for Microsoft

Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie has called Windows Azure a “turning point for Microsoft”. But web computing is hardly a new idea. We already do a lot of our day-to-day computing in the so-called ‘cloud’.

Our calendars might be online in Google Docs; our expenses stored in an Excel-compatible file sat on a distant Google data server. We bank online, we shop online. We catch up with TV shows using the BBC iPlayer and own virtual albums on iTunes. Using a webmail service like Gmail or Yahoo! Mail we can access our messages on a laptop, desktop, mobile phone or at an Internet café.

This sort of device-independent, go-anywhere access to our important ’stuff’ is arguably the future of personal computing.

What is ‘cloud computing’?

Cloud computing is essentially a combination of remote data hosting and Internet services, a nickname coined after the cloud shape that’s used to signify the Internet on network diagrams.

But there are different elements to this ‘cloud’. At its simplest, cloud computing describes using web 2.0 services like Google Docs, Zoho, Blinksale and Adobe’s Photoshop Express. As long as you have access to a web browser, you have access to your data, regardless of whether you’re using a Mac, a Windows PC, a Linux-powered netbook or a smartphone.

Working in this way, the role of the computer gets downgraded, recast as a tool to access your data rather than store it locally. So it doesn’t matter if you lose a laptop or the hard drive fails.

Lenovo is transferring this idea to small business computing with an initiative it calls ‘Secure Managed Client’ (SMC). Instead of giving employees a full-blown PC, Lenovo’s M57p and M58p desktops can be shipped without a hard drive (or with the hard drive disabled). All applications and data are stored safely in an off-site corporate data centre instead. It’s a variation on the ‘thin client’ idea trialled in the late 1990s.

Internet fad or a real future?

Microsoft isn’t the only one to notice that cloud computing is coming of age. At this year’s Macworld Expo, Apple announced an online component for iWork ‘09. Dubbed iWork.com, it provides Apple users with a web workspace where they can share their iWork documents with colleagues.

Apple already operates the MobileMe portal, a suite of services designed to synchronise email, calendar, contacts, photos and to provide online storage. Palm has also embraced the cloud with its latest smartphone. The Palm Pre runs Palm’s new webOS, which enables its core applications to communicate dynamically with the web.

At the other end of the cloud computing scale, Amazon’s Web Services provide unparalleled computing capacity to developers and businesses. These cover services such as application hosting, storage, content delivery and e-commerce. The collaboration tool Smartsheet is hosted on Amazon servers, for example. While 37Signals, the team behind web apps such as Basecamp, Highrise and Campfire, use Amazon to back up their 1TB file server.

Microsoft is playing catch-up. Like Amazon Web Services and Google App Engine, the Windows Azure platform will offer developers the ability to run and host applications remotely. Microsoft has already opened data centres in Washington D.C and San Antonio, Texas. Additional data centres are planned for Chicago and Dublin.

But crucially, Microsoft hopes that by offering a familiar development environment (Visual Studio 2008, .net, SQL Server and Hyper-V), anybody au fait with ASP.Net programming will be able to create a Windows Azure application just as easily.

The new virtual workspace

Little by little, core desktop applications are being threatened by web-based alternatives. Google Docs, for example, aggregates Google’s key online office applications – Gmail, Google Calendar, the Writely word processor, spreadsheet, PDF and PowerPoint viewers. Zoho offers a similar online office suite and Microsoft has teased with the prospect of an online version of Office to accompany this year’s ‘Office 14′ refresh.

What’s surprising is that Microsoft doesn’t see cloud computing as a threat to its existing products. Surely cloud-based applications could threaten sales of Office and impact Windows 7? Some analysts are already talking about Web 2.0 apps and Internet computing in terms of a ‘cloud OS’.

In the meantime, there’s evidence to suggest that Google employees are actively using an unnamed operating system, potentially a version of the Android OS. When your software is powered by a web browser, why do you need to invest in Windows?

Of course, Microsoft would argue that Google Docs hasn’t yet replaced Microsoft Office, despite the fact that Google Docs is free and accessible from anywhere.

But Microsoft is also in the business of making money from its software. The web-based version of Office will reportedly be available via Office Live and it won’t be free. Stephen Elop, Head of Microsoft’s business division, commented: “we expect that the full range of Office utilities, from the most advanced to simpler lightweight versions, will be available with a range of options: ad-funded, subscriptions-based, traditional licensing fees and so forth.”

What’s next for cloud computing?

The analysts at Gartner predict that 80 percent of Fortune 1000 companies in the US could be paying for Internet computing services by 2012. They have the potential to transform IT, cutting costs (possibly jobs) and improving efficiency.

But there are also questions around trust and reliability that need to be addressed. Where is your data going to be stored? How secure is it? What happens if the system breaks down? Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3) suffered an eight-hour outage in 2008, which in turn crippled the companies that depended on it. The lights went out twice on Google’s Gmail earlier this year.

Can we really trust our data to a cloud?

“A cloud is amorphous and indistinct,” says SearchDataCenter.com’s Chuck Goolsbee. “You can’t audit a cloud. It is virtual. Sure, we all know that it translates to a physical manifestation at some point, but can you touch it? Can you audit, with absolute certainty, its file systems, logs and physical access? Can you be absolutely certain that it is physically secure? Can you be absolutely certain that its virtualized file systems are not mingled on a physical disk with somebody else’s data?”

One thing is clear. The viability of cloud computing is no longer in doubt. But there are still a lot of unanswered questions and unresolved issues that need to be addressed. Cloud computing will be one of the big technology trends of 2009. Just how big is open to debate.

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