GSL 2015: WD talks My Cloud

Sorry, Cloud computing is a step too far Do I trust the long -or even medium- term integrity of any cloud system? No way!

tigertop1
Sorry, Cloud computing is a step too far Do I trust the long -or even medium- term integrity of any cloud system? No way!

That's a pretty sweeping generalisation, and not an opinion I'd support, although I obviously understand the concerns of people like Saracen who won't use any “cloud” system themselves. Making the distinction between cloud computing and cloud storage - there's quite a few systems out there that do client-side encryption. Heck Ed Snowden's been widely quoted as talking up SpiderOak for just that reason.

Secondly, you might want to actually watch the video. WD's “My Cloud” is a private cloud system. At the moment I've got one of these and it's purely being used as a NAS box on my intranet. It's up to me to decide whether I want to make it Internet enabled, and I might actually do that as a place to dump the holiday snaps - instead of OneDrive/Dropbox that I'm using at the moment.

Only exposure with the My Cloud devices is (assuming you adopt reasonable security practices) if WD had put in some kind of backdoor. But, I'll suggest, if they did that and got found out (which these days is a given) the damage to their reputation would be substantial. So there's a big incentive not to do it…

Well each to their own of course but with Terabytes of storage so cheap for the ordinary user it makes no sense to allow some third party to hold data–for a fee of course. I'm running 6 PCs doing various tasks and with about 15 Terabytes of shared storage between them I see no reason to let any third party get in on the act. I may be wrong but I do not see a long term future for cloud storage. There is also the question now being raised re who owns the rights to the cloud materiel in the event of the demise of the original contributor–tricky decision I understand and still no foolproof legal answer I believe

tigertop1
Well each to their own of course but with Terabytes of storage so cheap for the ordinary user it makes no sense to allow some third party to hold data–for a fee of course.

Yes, but if you've got all those “Terabytes of storage” at home, they aren't going to do you much good if you aren't at home at the time. And that's where “cloud storage” comes in - if I want to stream my music collection to my phone then I can.

tigertop1
I'm running 6 PCs doing various tasks and with about 15 Terabytes of shared storage between them I see no reason to let any third party get in on the act.

So don't - there's my point, a lot of people see “cloud storage” and immediately think that this means gifting all your valuable data to someone else. But, there's nothing to stop you “net enabling” your storage so it becomes a private cloud. See also OwnCloud, and similar systems for shared resource.

tigertop1
I may be wrong but I do not see a long term future for cloud storage.

That's presupposing that the move to mobile computing is going to reverse - is that really likely? And that's just for home use, for businesses there's a whole load of drivers to cloudy-cloud-cloud (to quote the much-missed Linux Outlaws podcast)

tigertop1
There is also the question now being raised re who owns the rights to the cloud materiel in the event of the demise of the original contributor–tricky decision I understand and still no foolproof legal answer I believe

Hmm, that's an interesting question. Best answer I've seen is that “digital assets” should - license permitting - be treated the same as physical ones. So the copyright on your photo's should pass to your heirs, but Apple (Google/Amazon/Spotify/etc) will not allow them to grab your iTunes (Play etc) library. The cynic in me thinks that the only reason that there's not an unarguable standard for this at the moment is that it's in the interests of lawyers (especially US-based ones) for there not to be.

Cloud storage and cloud computing are here to stay. They are the essence of the entire out-sourcing model which seems to be steam-rollering through the industry at the moment.

I have been keeping an eye on prices for a while, waiting to move my own home backups (~1.5TB for a full, although could easily up that to 10TB if I decided to backup media) to the cloud to save on electricity, time and for the convenience. Shame that they all seem to either be targeted at the small home user or the large corporation currently :(