But now that the news is out, has Chrome OS lost its shine? People had high expectations for Google's new operating system but the end result doesn't look like the revolutionary, "change the world" product many had hoped for.

Don't get us wrong - Google's OS is different than whatever Windows, Mac, or Linux build you have running on your computer today. The new OS does away with desktop applications entirely - everything you use on Google Chrome OS runs on the web. Of course, the company hopes you'll use a lot of Google products like Gmail and YouTube, but it doesn't limit you to just Google-branded services. In the built-in applications area, there are also links to other web apps like the online TV streaming service Hulu.com and music sites Lala and Pandora. To be fair, Chrome OS even links to Yahoo and Microsoft's webmail offerings right out of the box.

Google's major goal with Chrome OS is to moving computing off our personal hard drives and into the cloud...the Google cloud. To accomplish such a feat, they've made the web browser the OS. Everything you need (in theory) is accessible through the included Google Chrome browser, the same browser the company currently offers to Windows users with Mac and Linux versions expected by the end of this year.

As exciting as that vision is, we have to wonder if people - especially the mainstream netbook users the OS is aimed at - are ready for this big of a switch. And more importantly, is the technology itself ready to make the change a comfortable and seamless experience?

...but is it Better?

After digesting yesterday's news, some lingering questions remain. Was this the OS everyone was hoping for or has Google let us down?

You Can't Just Install Chrome OS - You Have to Buy a New Netbook

To begin with, one of the more surprising reveals that came out of yesterday's news is that the OS cannot be installed on your own computer. Oh sure, there are downloads available that use Google's open-sourced code to create bootable builds tech-savvy users and developers can play with, but the official word from the search giant is that anyone wanting to use the "real" Google Chrome OS will have to purchase a new netbook to do so. You cannot simply download it from the web and install it on any machine.

Part of the reason for this restriction is driver support. Google is working with carefully selected manufacturers to offer a handful of netbooks running the OS in the coming year. By going this route, they don't have to provide an entire ecosystem of drivers for every piece of hardware out there - they can pick and choose which ones to support. They'll likely limit the number of peripherals supported, too. According to what was said yesterday, the company will support "mass storage devices" (think USB flash drives and digital cameras) but were cagey on how they plan on offering printing support. All they would say is that they're planning on an "innovative approach" when it comes to printing, whatever that means. Hopefully, they're planning to do something more than just integrating with Kinko's and FedEx's online document services, for example. Printing, (sorry Google) is not a web app just yet.

No Other Web Browsers Supported

Another big disappointment is the company's decision to limit all web surfing to the one included browser, Google Chrome. Firefox and Safari users are out of luck - no other browsers will be supported. But before you cry out "antitrust!," be warned - Google has this covered. The code base used to build the OS is open-source - that means anyone take the code and create their own version of Chrome OS. As was carefully - and haltingly - explained by Google's VP of Product Management, Sundar Pichai, other browser makers can take the code and build their own OS if they want to. But let's get real - Firefox Chrome OS? We don't think so. The reality is that fans of other browsers are simply out of luck if they want to use this operating system.

Offline Access is Limited. Your New Netbook is Now a Brick.

One of the questions that got glossed over during the Q&A session at the end of the event is how Google's OS plans to deal with offline access. The world is not blanketed in Wi-Fi yet, so what can this web-based OS do without the web? Surprisingly, the answer given didn't refer to any subsidized deals with cellular providers regarding deals to offer built-in 3G connectivity for the new netbooks. Instead, Pichai explained that the OS was built for use with Wi-Fi.

Of course, a handful of Google products use Google Gears, a technology that makes websites available offline. For example, Gmail uses Gears to create an offline version of your webmail inbox which you can use to read and respond to email until internet connectivity becomes available again. At that point, all the changes are synced back to Google's servers. Although Google didn't specifically refer to Gears when answering the question, there's no reason to doubt that it will work in Chrome OS's web browser the same as it does now in the standard Chrome browser.

However, Pichai did make note of Chrome OS's support for HTML5, an upcoming revision to the core markup language used to build the web. In the new specification, a key feature is offline support for web apps. However, web application developers will have to rebuild their apps in order to use HTML5, so users will be dependent on each individual company to make this change. While it's believed that one day this spec could make the whole web an offline app, the reality is that most developers have yet to implement this technology in their services yet. Even by Chrome OS's launch next year, there's no reason to believe the landscape will have changed significantly by then.

Do You Really Need an OS or Just the Chrome Web Browser?

Finally, the big question regarding Chrome OS is why? What can the OS do that any operating system running the Chrome browser cannot? Based on what was shown yesterday, the answer is very little. Chrome OS's brand-new features consist of two things: application tabs and panels. The panels are persistent windows that pop-up in front of your web browser's main window. For example, Google Chat, the company's IM service, can live in a panel that stays on top no matter what window you're viewing.

Application tabs, meanwhile, are special tabs that give you easy access to your most frequently used web apps from the browser. Any page tab can be made into an application tab with one click and the resulting "tab" is represented with the colorful icon for that site or service. While that's certainly a cool feature, it alone isn't a major selling point for the OS. That would be like saying you have to buy Mac OS X because of the dock or Windows because of the taskbar. You need a million of these little features combined to add up to a compelling reason to buy an OS.

That's not to say that Chrome OS itself doesn't have worthwhile features of its own - like its built-in security mechanisms or its auto-update system, it's just that these aren't the kinds of things that sell it to an end user. The questions consumers want answers to are what does it do that's special? What does it look like? And for now, the answer is "it's basically just a web browser."

Revolution? Maybe Not Just Yet.

At the end of the day, Chrome OS is an exciting, but not fully realized, vision. Although it has potential, the world may not be ready for a web-based netbook right now. Also, the technology needed to make the Wi-Fi only netbook useful without an internet connection isn't up to full speed either. At the end of the day, the netbook will be marginally more useful than an iPod Touch - when connected, it's amazing. Offline, not so much.

While you might not rush right out to buy a Chrome OS netbook when they first launch, there could come a time - sooner than you think - when it becomes a reasonable choice. When the majority of apps work offline and you've fully transitioned away from desktop apps, a web-connected netbook, especially one that's affordable, could easily become your everyday computer. That day hasn't arrived yet. For now, Chrome OS is an exciting glimpse at the future of computing, but not a practical device for the majority of users.

Disclosure: Sarah Perez freelances for Microsoft's Channel 10 blog, but is not a Microsoft employee. Her primary web browser is, in fact, Google Chrome which she uses exclusively.

Despite its ho-hum reception, the company is moving forward with its plans to make Unite a full-fledged feature of the Opera browser. Today, the Opera Unite beta is launching and will be made available in Opera 10.10. Given the recent cloud outages, one has to wonder if Unite will be given a second look by the crowd of naysayers who so recently belittled it.

Not much about Unite has changed since its initial launch except that it initially spent several months as a standalone product before being integrated into the Opera web browser. Now, with the release of Opera 10.10, it's clear that the company intends for Unite to be one of the browser's core features.

Included in Unite are six applications which are the photo app, the file sharing app, messenger, the above mentioned media player, a "fridge" app that lets you post notes on your friends' virtual refrigerators and a web server that lets you host web sites directly from your computer.

Cloud Outages Leave Users Wary; Unite Gets a Second Look?

Although the technology itself remains, for the most part, the same, what may have changed in the time that passed since Unite's June reveal is the sentiment among Unite's potential users. Since the original launch, there have been numerous cloud computing outages which included yet another long-lasting Gmail outage, a DDOS attack that took down social services like Facebook, Twitter, and LiveJournal simultaneously, a Facebook database maintenance issue which locked 150,000 users out of their accounts for a week, multiple Twitter outages (although these are nothing new) and, of course, the granddaddy of them all: a cloud computing disaster at Danger that erased all personal data from the hansdets of thousands of T-Mobile Sidekick users.

All these above incidents occurred in the span of only a few months, too, leaving people to question the stability of the cloud. Perhaps the cloud, often thought of as much safer and more stable than our own personal hard drives, isn't all that it's cracked up to be after all? Instead of just uploading everything to the web and then assuming that it will be there forever, the rash of outages have many tech geeks returning to the old-fashioned computer backup in addition to hosting content out on the web.

This hybrid approach to cloud computing (local + cloud) could mean that some of Unite's former naysayers will give it a second look. Since it's designed for sharing locally stored files on the web using Opera's servers as a proxy, it taps into that whole "forgo the cloud" mentality. While Opera's man-in-the-middle server infrastructure may crash one day (and it's already had its struggles), your data would still be accessible assuming your computer itself doesn't die. To some, that may seem like a safer approach than a 100% reliance on cloud providers.

Others Say: Don't Blame the Cloud, It's Still the Future

However, not everyone thinks that outages, even those as severe as the Danger disaster, spell failure for the cloud computing model - they're only growing pains. Sure, "cloud computing isn't perfect," writes PC Mag's Lance Ulanoff, but Danger's failure is "a failure of, more than likely, a few over-worked IT guys who incorrectly set up data redundancy." Ulanoff contends, and many others will certainly agree, that despite failures such as this, the cloud overall remains safer and more trustworthy than anyone's own home or office computers.

Still, the outages may have some worried. Those who are worried enough to begin storing data back on their own computers, using the cloud only as backup and no longer as primary storage, may now be interested in trying out Opera Unite. That may give Unite a little boost for the time being. But ultimately, the technology that was supposed to change the web seems like backward progress. Cloud computing may have its ups and downs, but it's the future of computing, not Unite's peer-to-peer.

He notes that the service-level agreements (SLAs) for all the hosted applications are the same as those offered in the operation's traditional on-site computing environment - that is, 99.999% uptime. Google only offers 99.9% as does Amazon S3...and yes, those extra digits make a world of difference.

In addition, DISA also uses the same information assurance process (the process of managing information-related risks) for the RACE applications as it does for any apps running on the traditional, on-site computing platform. They've even cut the security accreditation process from 80 days to 40 thanks to built-in information insurance controls in RACE. 

One of the most obvious benefits of a cloud computing infrastructure, though, is the speed of deployment. The cloud platform has cut the acquisition time for a new server from 6 months to 24 hours - a change that means DISA will now be able to rapidly deploy new applications to the military in record time. "That's a must for worldwide missions with ever-changing computing requirements," says Sienkiewicz.

RACE runs using VMware on HP blade servers. Defense Department customers can choose either Microsoft Windows or Red Hat Linux and are able to configure their server with up to 4 CPUs, 8 GBs of memory and up to a terabyte of storage. Test servers are $500 per month and production servers are $1200 per month. Next year, RACE will be deployed on the DoD's classified network (SIPRNet) as well. 

Should Google be worried? Some analysts think so. "This is trouble for Google," said Matthew Cain of Gartner. Google of course, disagrees.

Google, whose online suite of applications is collectively known as Google Apps, has been making steady inroads in the business world with offerings tailored to schools, nonprofits, SMBs, and the enterprise. The company currently touts 15 million Apps users in nearly 2 million companies worldwide. Marketed as a less expensive and easier-to-manage alternative to on-site systems like Microsoft Exchange, the suite has encouraged many companies to switch to their hosted solution, mainly due to ever-decreasing IT budgets which have left penny-pinching companies scrambling to find ways to cut costs.

However, pitting iNotes against Google Apps isn't exactly a fair "apples to apples" comparison. That's because iNotes' focus is just email, calendaring, and contact management. Google Apps, on the other hand, is a more comprehensive suite that includes Google Docs, an online office suite, an intranet-building tool called Google Sites, and much more. Also, iNotes only provides 1 GB of storage for their product - if you want extra, you'll have to pay. Google, however, starts you off with a 25 GB inbox.

Still, since Lotus is the lower-priced solution, that alone may be enough for them to compete. Google Apps currently charges $50 per user per year but iNotes will be only $36. Those cost savings combined with the brand recognition of the IBM name will help iNotes quickly get in the game.

IBM: iNotes Delivers More Than Cost Savings, it Offers Stability

In addition to IBM's primary focus on price, the company is also taking advantage of some very public recent Gmail outages, including one which locked out corporate customers from their email for 2 hours last month, to prop up their solution as the more stable alternative. According to Poulley, IBM has a long-standing record of running "the world's mission-critical systems for banks, telcos, and utilities...We're bringing business class services and support with mission critical reliability at a price lower than the competition."

Google Responds: iNotes is No Google Apps

Google isn't taking all this lying down, though. Dave Girouard, President of Google's Enterprise division, said that Google will learn the business of selling software more quickly than IBM will adapt to cloud computing.

Andrew Kovacs, a Google spokesperson, also noted that IBM's positioning of their iNotes product seemed to be more of a complement to their on-site solutions than it was a replacement for them. With iNotes, it appears that IBM wants to supplement their current install base of Lotus Notes servers to deliver email to both deskless workers and those who didn't have email accounts already. Google Apps, on the other hand, is designed to be a complete "rip and replace" solution allowing businesses to do away with their on-site systems entirely in favor of a fully hosted cloud product.

He also pointed out that IBM's claims of reliability when it came to their iNotes product were unproven at this point. iNotes, which is based on IBM's acquisition of a Hong Kong company called Outblaze, does not appear to offer any service level agreements (SLAs)... at least it doesn't mention any on its website. IBM confirms that's the case, saying the company "has not made any specific promises regarding uptime" but that the company has a solid history of reliability. Still, without an SLA documented in black-and-white, companies, especially those in the enterprise space, are bound to be wary.

Finally, Kovacs spoke of the various ways in which Google products interoperate with other technologies used by large companies. The Google Apps system works with Microsoft Outlook, mobile phones including iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, and Blackberry. It even integrates with Blackberry Enterprise Server and directory systems like Microsoft's Active Directory.

In the end, though, Google says they're excited about the iNotes launch as it serves as "further validation that the future of computing is in the cloud." Having a well-respected and trusted organization like IBM offer something like this will bring more visibility to cloud computing and that is something that will be good for everyone.

While the glitch itself was minor and was fixed in a few days, the real concern - at least at Brown - was with how Google handled the situation. Without communicating to the internal IT department, Google shut down the affected accounts, a decision which led to a heated conversation between school officials and the Google account representative.

In the case of the Google Apps glitch, which began on Friday, September 11th, a couple of students notified Brown's Computing and Information Services department (CIS) that they were able to read emails belonging to other students. The CIS department contacted Google on the following day and sent out an email to the 200 students whose mailboxes were in transition, asking them whether or not they were experiencing the same problem. Some were. The affected students could either see entire inboxes belonging to another classmate or, in other cases, saw less than 100 messages that did not belong to them.

In the end, only 22 out of the 200 students were affected, but the fix was not put into place until Tuesday. That means that the students had access to each other's email accounts for three solid days (Saturday, Sunday, Monday) as well as parts of Friday and Tuesday before the accounts were suspended by Google.

Oddly enough, this situation seems to be acceptable, according to Tom, who, reports Brown's daily newspaper, "praised Google for its prompt response." (We don't know about you, but if someone else could read our email for three days, we wouldn't exactly call that "prompt.")

Massive data migrations are no small feat and Google's slip-up in this case is certainly not the first nor the last time that something has gone wrong. Still, Google is notably concerned when problems like this happen. "It was a small hiccup along the way and it's an issue we've taken extremely seriously," said Google's Rajan Sheth.

The Real Problem Wasn't Email, it was Lack of Communication

However, the real issue that concerned the university was the matter of communication between Google and the CIS department. Before fixing the issue on Tuesday, Google suspended the affected accounts, a necessary step that was taken so no more data was improperly shared. What angered the IT director, though, was that the accounts were suspended without first notifying CIS.

"I've spoken very forcefully with the account (executive), my boss, senior administrators at Brown -- including the president. (Google needs) to find a better way to communicate with us," said Tom.

When considering a move to a cloud service, most companies and institutions focus on how the change will affect budgets and the bottom line. They also think about data conversion issues and possible needs for re-training in some cases. However, one of the things that doesn't come up as often is exactly how communication will take place between the business and the company involved. Sure, companies may discuss the procedures (use this form, this phone number) and uptime guarantees, but they can't possibly imagine every scenario and spell out how they want the cloud provider to perform.

No longer can company execs just stroll into the I.T. guy (or gal's) office and cry out "my email is messed up!" Now there are a few more hoops to jump through. And whether it's Google or someone else, the interactions that take place and the way the issues are addressed will be a learning experience on both ends.

Do You Need This?

Some people may think that backing up their cloud-stored documents is a somewhat unnecessary step to take. After all, the cloud, especially a service as robust as Google Docs, is often already being used as the trustworthy backup location for the local files created on your computer. However, those who use Google Docs as their only location for creating and storing files may be feeling that it's "better safe than sorry."

Although arguably safer than storing files on your own PC's hard drive, using just one cloud service for critical files can still be seen as a "single point of failure," to use I.T.-speak. Besides, considering what we saw occur with Twittergate (the attack on Twitter HQ where a hacker gained access to the company's private documents hosted on Google Docs), there's always the possibility that a malicious individual could gain access to your account and do terrible things...like wipe out your important documents just for fun or perhaps even hold them hostage for ransom! Maybe that's being overly paranoid, but if your files are really that critical, it's better to take the extra precaution just in case.

Of course, you could certainly perform this type of backup procedure yourself, but Gladinet saves you the time by automating the process. Plus, since it runs on pre-configured intervals, you don't have to remember to do it.

The new Google Docs backup feature is available in the Professional and soon-to-launch Premium edition of the software available for download here. Unfortunately, Gladinet is PC-only software at the moment, but the company reports a Mac version is on the roadmap.

But hacks alone aren't the only dangers to be found when moving to the cloud, as the Black Hat presentations quickly made clear. In reviewing the dangers brought up by the researchers, it was enough to make anyone wonder: is cloud computing putting us and our data at risk?

In Sensepost's presentation about cloud vulnerabilities (available here as a PowerPoint download), they make note of the fact that moving your data to a cloud service is the equivalent of "putting all your eggs in one basket." Not too long ago, we saw a perfect example of the worst-case scenario of doing just that. Earlier this year, social bookmarking site Ma.gnolia experienced a server crash that resulted in massive data loss - enough to shut down the service for good. Users' bookmarks were unrecoverable. Permanently.

While that incident may have had only a minimal impact on the world at large, Sensepost pointed out a few other examples that were much worse including that of online storage service MediaMax (also called The Linkup) which went out of business following a system administration error that deleted active customer data. Then there was the incident where Salesforce.com customers were locked out of their critical business applications during a service outage. And finally, they mentioned Nokia's Ovi crash which resulted in three weeks of lost user data as contacts simply disappeared from people's phones. There were no backups in place, either.

These incidents highlight some of the pitfalls that can come from trusting cloud services, and it's precisely for those reasons that enterprise IT is making the move at a much slower rate than consumers. This is especially true in heavily regulated industries where compliance is an issue. Sensepost's presentation quotes Tim Mather, RSA Security Strategist, on this point: "If it's non-regulated data, go ahead and explore. If it is regulated, hold on. I have not run across anyone comfortable putting sensitive/regulated data in the cloud."

Cloud Danger #2: Too Much Trust?

In another part of the Sensepost presentation, they looked specifically at vulnerabilities of Amazon's Web Services. To start off, they detailed the process involved in setting up a new instance on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). The first step is to create a new Amazon Machine Image (AMI) containing your applications, libraries, data, and other associated configuration settings. However, as an alternative, you could use a pre-configured templated image to get up and running quickly.

There's only one problem with that, though. While Amazon has provided 47 machine images they built themselves, the remaining 2721 images were build by other EC2 users. Can you really believe that all of these images were built securely? Basically, the template directory is just a big archive of user-generated content. And you know what user-gen content is like... risky.

Sensepost asks: Do people really just run machines other people create? Apparently, the answer is yes.

The rest of the presentation went on to demonstrate a hack that allowed them to steal others' machine time by setting up images that included "back doors" in them and tricking other EC2 customers into using those compromised images as their EC2 template.

Cloud Danger #3: Reliance on Passwords

Another issue with cloud computing services is that, despite the numerous protections built into a cloud service itself, any account is only as secure as the password used to access it. A recent example of the consequences of insecure passwords was seen during what has now become known as "Twittergate." The microblogging service Twitter had their online accounts accessed by a hacker and numerous sensitive corporate documents stolen. The documents were housed in Google's online web office service Google Docs. Although Google was not to blame for the break-in, the hack may not have ever occurred in the first place if documents were securely hosted on-site, behind a firewall. Instead, the entire company data was only one password crack away from discovery.

Password cracking is not the only threat from what is seemingly becoming a more and more archaic system for logging into online services. Weak password recovery systems are an issue, too. In a separate presentation at Black Hat, both Amazon and Microsoft's Online Services came under fire for having poor password recovery systems. That's something that should come as no surprise, Andy Cordial, Origin Storage's managing director, was quoted as saying:

"Password resetting and other security mechanisms in the cloud are always going to be a weak link, as long as user-friendliness comes ahead of security in the cloud computing beauty stakes. Expecting regular joes to whip out a two-factor authentication device for use with a cloud-driven service just isn't realistic. It's not going to happen."

But without more secure methods of gaining access to cloud services, users themselves are the weakest link. Of course, this issue is not new. IT administrators have struggled with users' lack of good security practices for years on end. Ever since computers required a password, in fact. However, the difference between a corporate network and an online account is that in a business environment, administrators can create server-enforced password policies that require users to make up passwords with certain minimum levels of complexity. They can also force users to reset their passwords on a regular basis. But in the cloud, a user could set their password to "fluffy" and never change it again.

Some cloud vendors are beginning to offer security policy control for their applications which would allow an IT admin to create and enforce stricter policies (like a secure password policy, for instance). Today, though, this is an area where many cloud applications are still lacking.

Cloud Danger #4: Encrypting Data in the Cloud

Alex Stamos, an iSec Partners researcher present at BlackHat brought up the issue of data encryption. He noted that many cloud providers do not offer encryption for their service. In a presentation done along with Andrew Becherer and Nathan Wilcox, they discussed a little-known flaw in virtual computing - virtual machines don't always have enough access to the random numbers needed to properly encrypt data. The details of this issue are highly technical, but fascinating, and the end result is that the very nature of virtual computing itself makes hacking simpler because it allows attackers to more easily guess the numbers used to generate the encryption keys.

Stamos admits that this problem isn't an immediate threat to cloud computing, but it does require more research. "It's certainly not a slam dunk," he says. "But we do think that you could potentially reduce the complexity enough that the encryption can be broken by a determined hacker."

Side note: Information Week has a good podcast interview with Stamos about this subject, too.

So, Is the Cloud Safe?

Considering the above issues, you may find yourself thinking twice about your reliance on cloud services. And if you listen to security analysts like John Pescatore of Gartner, you may be even more afraid. He was recently quoted in the Financial Times as saying:

"The security of these cloud-based infrastructure services is like Windows in 1999. It's being widely used and nothing tremendously bad has happened yet. But it's just in early stages of getting exposed to the Internet, and you know bad things are coming."

Yikes, right?

But is the cloud really all that bad? Is it any worse of a platform for computing than what we had before? In reality, probably not. Although the cloud will provide a new set of challenges and threats to deal with - and these will be more prevalent in the early stages of the transition - it doesn't necessarily present threats that are that dramatically worse than old-school on-site computing.

In the end, some cloud vendors will step up and make their cloud applications more secure, layering in security policies, encryption and the like while doing their best to mitigate the single-point-of-failure issues. Those vendors will eventually be rewarded for their efforts as more users, and then businesses, adopt their platform. Those that ignore the security issues will soon fall out of favor.

Today's cloud services may not be as secure as they should be, but in time they could easily rival any other computing platform... in fact, they may one day be considered more secure. Until then, though, users, and especially companies, should proceed with caution when moving to the cloud, making sure they're fully aware of not only the capabilities of the online service, but the risks as well.

Why Mobile Cloud Computing?

With a Western-centric view of the world, it can sometimes be hard to remember that not everyone owns a smartphone. There are still a large number of markets worldwide where the dominant phone is a feature phone. While it's true that smartphones will grow in percentage and feature phones will become more sophisticated in time, these lower-end phones are not going away anytime soon. And it's their very existence which will help drive the mobile cloud computing trend.

Not only is there a broader audience using feature phones in the world, there are also more web developers capable of building mobile web applications than there are developers for any other type of mobile device. Those factors, combined with the fact that feature phones themselves are becoming more capable with smarter built-in web browsers (and more alternative browsers available for download), will have an impact on mobile cloud computing's growth.

How Will Mobile Cloud Computing Become a Disruptive Force?

There are two primary reasons why ABI believes cloud computing will become a disruptive force in the mobile world. The first is simply the number of users the technology has the power to reach: far more than the number of smartphone users alone. The second reason has to do with how applications are distributed today. Currently, mobile applications are tied to a carrier. If you want an iPhone app, for example, you have to first have a relationship with the mobile operator who carries the iPhone. If you want a Blackberry app, the same rule applies. But with mobile clouding computing applications, as long as you have access to the web, you have access to the mobile application.

Moves by PaaS Players Could Change Everything

When you think of Plaform-as-a-Service (PaaS), one of the first companies that springs to mind is probably Salesforce. With their Force.com platform, business applications can be built and run "in the cloud." But Salesforce is not the only major PaaS player out there today - Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google's App Engine are also two platforms that could have a major impact on this trend.

Currently, AWS is used by over half a million developers and Google's App Engine hosts 45,000 applications. Now imagine if those two companies along with Force.com all of a sudden started aggressively marketing their mobile capabilities. Today, neither AWS nor Google offers this, and Salesforce's mobile offering is limited to smartphones (Windows Mobile, Blackberry, and iPhone). But if the companies decided to make building for the mobile web as easy as building for the web, you could have a mobile revolution on your hands.

But People Like Apps!

Saying that "mobile cloud computing" is the future doesn't mean phones will be filled with links to websites that work in any browser instead of special, downloadable applications, some of which you can even purchase. Instead, mobile applications will exist in both formats. As for the downloadable applications themselves, they will still appear to be your typical mobile app - end users won't even notice a difference. However, there will be a difference - it will just be on the back-end. Mobile applications will begin to store your data in the cloud as opposed to on the mobile device, and the applications will become more powerful as processing power is also offloaded to the cloud.

The first mobile apps powered by the cloud will likely be business-focused mobile productivity applications where collaboration, data sharing, multitasking, and scheduling are key factors. For consumers, though, navigation and mapping applications will be the most obvious examples of the trend. Plus, there are some specialty applications today which already function as mobile cloud apps - for example, Schlage offers a remote keyless entry system which lets you mobilely control your home from a distance. You can let someone into your house, manage your lights, your thermostat, your camera system, etc. There are also a few applications in the iPhone app store that let you remotely manage your PC and your DVR, too.

Potential Problems

Of course, there are some potential issues that could be barriers to this shift in mobile computing. The most notable problem is the lack of speedy mobile Internet access everywhere. Here in the US, for example, 3G coverage is spotty outside urban areas, leading to intermittent connection issues and slow speeds. Other markets may have it even worse.

However, new technologies like HTML5, which does local caching, could help mobile cloud apps get past those sorts of issues. And there's even a chance that the browser could one day be replaced - at least in some markets - with another technology altogether which provides a better way to access the mobile web. ABI Research mentions initiatives like OMA's Smartcard Web Server, essentially a souped-up SIM card that connects directly with the carrier to push applications to mobile phones. There's also TokTok, a technology that allows access to web services like Gmail and Google Calendar by voice. With voice-enabled search like this, mobile apps could talk directly to the service itself which sits on the edge of the network, as opposed to needing the user to launch a web browser and navigate through the mobile web.

When Will Mobile Cloud Computing Really Take Off?

According to ABI, this change is only a few years away. By 2010, we'll see one or all of the major PaaS players marketing their mobile capabilities, they say. But first, API standards from open-source mobile collaboration group BONDI will go into effect. Later, in 2011, we'll see more of HTML5, and the OneAPI standard will come into play. (OneAPI involves standardized apps for networks allowing developers to consistently access parts of network providers' capabilities, such as location services). All these factors combined will help drive the move to the cloud.

The changes will occur with differing speeds depending on the market. Markets with higher Internet participation will obviously lead the way, as will markets with higher subscriber penetration. That includes Western Europe, North America, and parts of Asia. Other markets will then follow. By 2014, mobile cloud computing will become the predominant application development strategy. By that time, our PCs will be more like thin client devices than they are today, and now it seems our phones will too.

SaaS offerings made available will be government-approved services like email, productivity apps, document management and business process management software. Those services are intended for use by other government agencies. Even more exciting may be the application platform that's part of the plan.

The prospect of government agencies using a government cloud platform to build and deploy web based applications like the private sector has used services like Amazon's cloud computing is exciting. By lowering overhead and easing application management, a government cloud could yield a wave of application innovation across agencies. That's the theory at least.

If government is to become the next hot application development sector, it will have to compete with a private tech sector that's already deep into this paradigm and offers developers the possibility of turning cheap web apps into huge riches through acquisition by larger firms.

Also worth watching will be any integration between the government's new cloud platform, data created by the apps deployed on it and the federal site data.gov, where an ostensible cross-section of public data is cataloged for subsequent use as development fodder. Creation of a mutually beneficial development ecosystem seems ambitious and promising, but could be far-fetched. Apps on a cloud, contributing data to the data storehouse, so that other developers could pull that data back onto the platform to create new apps and feed new data back into data.gov listings? Sounds too good to be true.

For a more in-depth look at the government's cloud agenda, see today's write-up by Jason Miller at Federal News Radio.

G.ho.st, which already implements well-known applications such as Google Docs, Meebo, Last.fm, and Pandora, has now announced an open API for developers, allowing them to add any web-based application as an integrated part of the G.ho.st virtual desktop.

The API launches as part of the company's developing GOSPL (G.ho.st web Operating System PLatform) architecture, outlined below:

We should note that for apps not contained in a single, swf file, G.ho.st will not be able to provide hosting. What they do offer is onscreen real estate, user intentification and profile information (based on consent), consent-based access to the user's file system, and communication with the G.ho.st desktop and other third-party apps. In the future, the company also hopes to arrange monetization and billing services for web apps.

AppLogic, as we wrote in 2006, "allows Web companies to manage - and scale - all their applications, servers and storage with just a browser." The AppStore offers software stacks for AppLogic deployments, and its catalog spans all kinds of elements and applications, from networking and server components to storage solutions, as well as management and monitoring tools.

AppStore users will find pre-configured, ready-to-use elements from software vendors, many free or offered as trial versions with other appliances offered on a pay-per-use basis. Data center architects and consultants can package and publish ready-to-run app infrastructures, complete with capabilities such as clustered solutions, high availability, disaster recovery, on-demand scalability, and automated backups and security.

Initial AppStore vendors include CohesiveFT, Layer 7 Technologies, SOASTA, Tap In Systems, and Zeus Technology. 3Tera is also seeking additional infrastructure and software vendors to round out AppStore offerings in time for its beta release in Q3 2009.

"Monitoring cloud assets, scaling capacity automatically, and balancing traffic efficiently have been among the most requested Amazon EC2 features from our customers," said Peter DeSantis, General Manager of Amazon EC2. "Together, these capabilities provide customers more control of their AWS resources and enable them to architect for even better performance, resilience and cost savings."

CloudWatch gives Amazon customers visibility into resource use, operational performance, and overall demand patterns, including metrics such as CPU use, disk reads and writes, and network traffic. Auto Scaling ensures EC2 usage increases during traffic spikes to maintain performance and decreases during lulls to reduce costs, making it particularly appropriate for apps with frequent use fluctuations. Elastic Load Balancing allows for fault tolerance in applications, detects unhealthy instances within a pool, and reroutes traffic to healthy instances until the unhealthy instances have been restored.

Amazon hopes these features will improve application performance, lower costs, and make life easier for developers and entrepreneurs. Amazon CloudWatch and Elastic Load Balancing are available on a pay-as-you-go basis, and Auto Scaling is enabled by Amazon CloudWatch and carries no additional fees. Features are currently available in the U.S. and should be available in the EU shortly.

One of the major benefits of this technology is its ability to extend a phone's battery life since the phone no longer needs to use its CPU as much as before. It can also be used to scan the phone for security issues even if the phone is turned off.

However, the main advantage of the CloneCloud system is that it can dramatically improve the phone's capabilities. For example, Chun created a test application which performed facial recognition on photos. On the mobile phone, it required 100 seconds to run, but once offloaded to another computer, the same task took just one second.

Still, the CloneCloud service may face some challenges of its own including network latency and bandwidth limitations. The phone's data connection speed, as we all know, varies as you move through different coverage areas. If you stumble into a "dead" zone, there isn't much CloneCloud can do for you.

At present, CloneCloud exists as a prototype that runs on Google's Android mobile OS. It will be demonstrated for the first time publicly at the HotOS XII conference in Switzerland later this month. In the meantime, you can read up on the service's details in the PDF "Augmented Smartphone Applications Through Clone Cloud Execution."

For the most part, though, the outrage over the outages and downtimes suffered in cloud computing are overblown. Even when they last for hours, there are few cases where complete data loss has occurred (e.g. Google Docs comes back up, but your data store is wiped clean)...well, unless you count Ma.gnolia.

But Gladinet seems to tap into that primal fear that comes with the loss of control accompanying cloud computing; the fear that your precious data will one day be lost to the ether. O.K. sure, that's not all the software does. It also connects your computers together so you can share files, provides a platform for different cloud services to interact with each other, and provides tools for easily moving your local data to the cloud. Yet, out of all its features, the fact that you can keep PC and cloud in sync - with a local backup for safekeeping - is probably one of the service's biggest selling points.

Is that the future of cloud computing, though? A combined cloud/PC experience? Or will cloud computing eventually make our hard drives, filled with locally stored files, obsolete? With the rise of netbook computing and mobile computing, it seems that the transition has been directly influenced by the number of web/mobile apps that now replace what local software once provided.

So where does that leave a software program like Gladinet? Is it a useful platform for hybrid computing? Or just a transitional piece holding us over until the cloud is all we use?

It's not only in scientific realms. We're seeing this on the Consumer Web too, as Marshall Kirkpatrick explained this morning in an article about social media monitoring tools. He wrote that data mining tools are being democratized and used more nowadays, similar to how online publishing tools were democratized in Web 2.0. The cloud computing servers that the University of Washington will utilize are relatively cheap and easy to use Web platforms that will enable data mining on a scale not seen before. These projects will access a cloud datacenter established for educational use in 2007, through a partnership between Google, IBM and six academic institutions (including the University of Washington).

Oceans and Galaxies of Data

Bill Howe, a researcher at the UW's eScience Institute, explained the impact of cloud computing on his ocean climate simulation project. Instead of running a simulation to test a single hypothesis, he said, climate scientists are now running long-term simulations and then sifting through tens of thousands of gigabytes of resulting data to discover trends.

Andrew Connolly, a UW associate professor of astronomy, explained that for his project analyzing astronomical images, cloud computing makes it easier to store and process information in the cloud and make the information available over the Web. He said that whereas scientists once competed for time on telescopes, recorded data and then studied the individual images in detail, now "telescopes continuously record high-resolution images that are available to all, providing millions of times more information." So the shift is that the data gathering has been automated and is available on a much larger scale than before for scientists to analyze it.

Data Rich - And Useful

This current era of the Web, which some are calling 'Web 3.0' (but we frankly don't know what it's called yet) is increasingly data rich. The same thing could have been said about the Web 2.0 era, when oceans of 'User Generated Content' were created. However the world of sensors is rapidly pouring even more data onto the Web. Ed Lazowska, a UW professor of computer science and engineering, noted that "the rapid evolution of sensors is transforming all sciences from data-poor to data-rich." He said that "the challenge is to use modern cloud computing resources, such as Amazon Web Services, and modern computer science advances, such as data mining and machine learning, to explore these massive volumes of data." He claimed that this new computational science will be pervasive and will have enormous impact.

We're always pleased when the Web has a meaningful impact on the 'real world' - and particularly on science projects such as this, where the findings could be profound.