Originally published in Made in Brunel 2010.
The Internet is an evolving entity, and how we use and consume it is constantly changing. But beyond the day-to-day development, what do we need to consider as businesses, individuals and citizens of the Internet, when it comes to defining the evolution of the net as we move into a cloud computing era?
Later this year marks the 20th anniversary of the world wide web. The Internet can trace its history back much further, to the 1960s. We’ve seen the web mature during this time, from its early start as a read-only, series of static pages and images, to a dynamic, social, and more collaborative environment.
Of course, now there are many varying purposes for the web. We use it for communicating, entertaining, and debating. It is a crucial tool used by individuals to get their views across, businesses to trade, and information to be found.
Driving the web’s ability to push into more and more areas of our lives has been the gradual increase in bandwidth and ability of websites to utilise this capacity. Twenty years ago YouTube would never have been possible, yet today it has become one of the most popular destinations online.
The internet has and will become more ubiquitous. As it becomes more integrated with everyday life, we’ll start to see less of a distinction between off, and on, line. It has become widely recognised that the Internet is an important fourth utility, after water, electricity and gas.
The always-on Internet has meant that as individuals we have embedded it into our everyday lives. Google has become the defacto first port of call for everything, tweets and status updates are made constantly, and we rely on instant messaging and email to keep us in touch. It is not surprising that we want to take this world with us on the go.
You and I expect that we have access to our data everywhere we go. It seems archaic that we should only be able to access emails from one computer, or not see the latest updates from our social networks whilst out and about.
This demand for access everywhere has been a contributing factor in the rise of the ‘cloud’, the concept of computing software and hardware as a service. Now, this is not a particularly new idea, web-based email has been around for many years. What is new is the push to move more and more of our data online.
Virtually every piece of software available as a desktop application, can now be found online, as a web application, often for free. There are versions of photo editing tools, office suites, email systems, project management tools, bookkeeping… the list is endless. All run in the browser, which to some has become the most important piece of software on their computer.
The most successful of these systems give you the right tools for access on the go. You probably won’t want to create your next Photoshop masterpiece on your iPhone, but you probably will want to check some quick details in a spreadsheet, or see progress on the latest project.
One of the reasons that Adobe’s Flash technology has fallen out of favour is that it is designed to deliver the same, identical, experience to every browser and every device. In the app-generation, we are expecting a customised experience depending on the method we use to access the service. This is reflected in the success of Apple’s App Store for the iPhone, and why other mobile operating system makers are eager to create their own.
The cost of handsets keeps falling, and hopefully this will mean they can be a massive force for good in some of the least developed countries. With little fixed-line and power infrastructure, mobile technologies will be the best way to get some of the poorest inhabitants of Earth online, and deliver the education, financial and health benefits that this brings.
Again, the cloud will be instrumental in this – as infrastructure in data centres thousands of miles away can be accessed through low-cost, low-power, mobile devices. Of course, there are challenges here for designers, both in terms of the design of a new generation of low cost mobile phones with all the features of our current Internet-enabled smartphones, and for the designers and developers of the services that will run on them. The audience for these potentially has never used a desktop computer, so we have to rethink all the interface assumptions we make as a result.
However, much as the cloud can remove some of the barriers to entry to software, knowledge and resources, it also has some serious questions to answer.
Are we ceding responsibility for this data to the right people, and are we always checking how it might be used?
Privacy is of course a major issue of contention as we increasingly move our personal lives, business data, and memories in to the cloud. Precisely who has access to our data, how it will be used and even who ultimately owns it are all questions that should be asked. Perhaps these are the responsibility of individuals as they sign up to services, but how many of us ever read software terms?
Our company makes extensive use of cloud and managed web services, for hosting, accounting, email, documents and project management. In some cases we’ve chosen based on cost (free!), in others because it the best way of making sure the data is accessible to the whole team. We’re even developing our own web-based software offering, so we’re firmly in the cloud.
But what happens when you want to move to another provider? How do you move your data?
Essentially, as computing power and software becomes more and more commoditised, your data becomes the valuable item. How do we ensure that as software and data storage is centralised, that individuals retain rights and access to their data, and can get this data in a manner that can be migrated to other providers?
Of equal importance is whether all data is created equal. The issue of net neutrality, the idea that all data should be transported through the Internet’s infrastructure with equal priority, is bound to come under further pressure as more and more services move to the cloud.
If the Googles of the world become too powerful we are in danger of seeing control of our data and the way it is delivered being ceded to one organisation. And this fundamentally clashes with the founding principle that the Internet, and the web and other services that run upon it, are decentralised and there is no single source of all data.
Jordan is Creative Director at Naked Creativity, the branding, graphic design and website development agency he established after graduating from Brunel in 2007.
I don’t know I would say that Flash has become that unpopular – there are still plenty of new web 2 sites springing up that make heavy use of it like Prezzi and Issuu. And on the flipside of course while Apple has had great success with iTunes it is still another propriatory system that develops have to adapt too.
It seems almost like we are now treating data like we used to treat money – we are starting to end the sock under the matress approach of our single PC or laptop with all our valuable data on it, to be replaced with an online virtual ‘bank’ that allows you to draw your data out from any internet connected device.
The real challenge for cloud computing will be to get the large organizations on board – the ones who still insist on viewing free or low cost services as an anathema because they think their data is too valuable to be entrusted to them. Differences in data protection laws around the world are also an issue. Perhaps what the cloud needs is some sort of international regulating body which awards organizations with certain levels of ‘trustworthiness’ when they meet certain rules related to data security and transfer.
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