Trust technology and store your data online

Apr 28 2008 By Giles Turnbull

What’s most important to you – the computer you carry around in your bag or your pocket, or the data that is stored upon it?

It’s the data, of course.

Data is the currency of the modern age; the only reason we all carry computers around is because they are the only convenient way of moving the data from place to place.

What makes this so frustrating is that a lot of the time, we shouldn’t have to.

In theory, it’s easy to move data around electronically. That’s what the internet is so good at.

In practice, people are more concerned with security; or more precisely, there’s a lack of trust. No one trusts the internet connection to work at a conference centre, so they take slides with them on a laptop instead.

Videoconferencing was once hailed as the end of international business travel, but no one could trust the technology enough to depend on it for important meetings.

We’ve reached the point where we no longer trust the computer technology that is just starting to reach the level of complexity that was attributed to it five or ten years ago.

Just as predicted by Moore’s Law, the hardware we use has become far more powerful than it used to be.

But fewer people predicted a shift of data and processing away from these more powerful computer devices, to something much more indistinct: the web itself.

Faced with these landscape-altering changes, everyone has to change tactics. Microsoft, threatened by the vigorous speed with which Google has appeared and stolen its throne, has just announced something it calls "Live Mesh". In short, it’s a specification for ensuring that the precious data we all depend on can follow us around, invisibly, on the web.

We can reach it from any device, large or small, fixed or mobile, as long as it runs appropriate software.

This is more than just a new product, this is a radical shift in emphasis. Microsoft has made its enormous fortune from helping people manage data on the hard disk that sat on the desk in front of them.

Now, it must lurch sideways, offering similar help to a new generation of users who do trust the web, who are likely to entrust their working lives and their leisure pursuits to it in full.

Oddly, it is online retailer Amazon that has been leading the way for others like Microsoft to follow.

Along with Google, Amazon has developed online file storage systems – massively distributed, massively interconnected, and incredibly cheap – for smaller web companies to bootstrap their services upon.

And everywhere you look online, the mantra is data.

Increasingly, the web is about the data that it can provide, and the ways the data can be combined and re-used.

No wonder everyone – from Microsoft down – cares about it so much.

* Giles Turnbull has a website at www.gilest.org