Cloud services are getting bigger and bigger, with media heavyweights like Amazon and Google throwing their versions into the competition. Although Google’s entry isn’t necessarily indicative of the next big thing — Buzz, anyone? — the cloud appears to be here to stay, mostly because of the safety it provides.
“The cloud has eliminated many of the worries about data integrity, security and availability,” said Ross Kimbarovsky, co-founder of crowdSPRING, a crowdsourcing marketplace. Kimbarovsky says cloud service providers “do a far better job protecting our data than we do in protecting our own data. Even the world’s most sophisticated companies would have difficulty matching the security, accuracy and availability provided by these top vendors.”
Whereas laptops can break down or get stolen, “most cloud providers have sophisticated data backups and redundancy in place,” said Frank Dale, president and CEO of Compendium, a cloud-based content marketing platform. “Solutions delivered through the cloud are updated automatically, so users always have the latest version.”