Way back in the early 1990s Sun Microsystems had a slogan “the network is the computer”. It did not make sense to any of us back then. However, today it is a different story. Today we are rapidly moving our personal applications into the Cloud sometimes perhaps without even realising that it is happening.

Here’s some examples of how we’re already using cloud computing in our personal lives:

* Gmail & Google Calendar for all your email and appointments
* Facebook for all your friends
* LinkedIn for all your business contacts
* Blogger, WordPress or another hosted blogging platform for your diary

It might be time to make a backup of some of that info that you’ve got floating around in the cloud. Only a few months ago I was unable to log into Gmail for 3 days. And recently there was a total data loss for JournalSpace blogging platform, where all blogs going back about 5 years were wiped out. What price then cloud computing?

There is some way to go yet before we can really trust the cloud. But rest assured it is coming. In the future people will laugh at the quaint idea that we once had stand alone computers and storage.