[cloud_zone]

A natural move by apple. Is it too late or just the right time? And, should Google and other competitors be worried?

[RonOBrien]

Well, I am not at all fussed about 'The Cloud' - I suspect it is a 'must have' buzz word for those who have to have everything 'techky', I see it as a gimmick and little more. Frankly I just do not trust it, far too many high profile servers (which I would expect would have much greater security) have recently been hacked.

If I were in charge at the Data Protection HQ I would be very watchful over the smaller companies, in particular, that might be early adopters of - perhaps - less secure systems, and being the owner of a small firm with a large database, I wouldn't entertain it at all for my aforementioned reasons. In fact I've banned it in the workplace.

I'm sure the technical boffins that might read this post will be thinking 'luddite', but anyone who knows me also knows that I have been very good at predicting cumputer security failings over the past 10-15 years - many I have voiced to MP's/parliament who have all assured me that government data is safe, that NHS data is safe etc etc - and maybe it was in the days of Commador 64's!

Having said that I get some free space with icloud via OS5 on my iPhone and I do use it - very infrequently - usually to put photos on and the 'Find my iPhone' facility is great. What else do I need it for? I don't! I back-up to a hard drive or flash drive and if I need something backing up quickly, then I email the file to one or more of my email addresses.

Have others anything to be worried about, you ask? well icloud is what it is a room in cyberspace where you can deposit your various naughts & zeros. I guess much depends on what you want out of the cloud and only time will tell if it really is secure and anything like a necessity in your day-to-day computing needs - I suspect not for the vast majority of people.

Personally I prefer to have HDD's in my home or place of work and if I need any kind of mobility, I have various flashdrive options that I am much more confident in.

[ham12ish]

I totally agree. There is a lot of hype around the cloud and may large providers wont provide details of their security measures. Like you, I also make use of DAS, NAS and removable drives. Having said that, I do run a web shop that runs on the cloud through Amazon Services, because I want to make use of the benefits of being linked with Amazon.