In the early 1980s, I was a student at BYU. I shelled out some serious cash (for a poor student) and bought one of the very first Apple Macintosh computers. Remember the box-looking thing that had the tiny monitor built in?
My Macintosh didn’t have a hard drive—just a single 720k floppy. I splurged and purchased an external floppy so I didn’t have to do so much disk swapping.
Sheesh, that was such a pain!
If you remember those days, you can truly appreciate how far we’ve come in data storage technology.
Those days are long gone—thank goodness. Now we can store 128GB on an SD microchip, or on a USB thumb drive and carry it anywhere we want.
Amazing!
The Development of Cloud Technology
As awesome as microchips and USB drives are, they pale in comparison to what has happened in the past few years.
Today, we enter data in our smartphones and within seconds we can see the same thing on our computers and tablet.
Talk about amazing!
The Cloud has changed everything. From emails, and contacts, to calendar items, photos, documents, and more. Even data from claims management systems reside in the cloud now—and we can view it on a desktop, laptop, smartphone, or tablet with no problem at all.
Cloud Security Concerns
A little over a year ago I wrote a blog for Claimwire.com. In it, I shared a few examples of “slow adopters”, or people who were leery of The Cloud. The primary reason people were hesitant to move to The Cloud was security – they weren’t comfortable with their sensitive data sitting on a server that wasn’t theirs.
Understandable, but unnecessary.
The Cloud has an excellent track record of being secure – more so than other forms of storage. Professional “cloud” companies such as Salesforce, Amazon, and Dropbox stake their companies (or at least their reputation) on their Cloud products. They are very serious about data security – probably more than the slow adopters that were worried about it.
In other words, your data is most likely safer with a reputable Cloud provider than anything you could do on your own.
Where to Next?
We haven’t moved everything to The Cloud…yet. Personally, I see that day coming in the not-too-distant future. Think about how many people use smartphones and tablets now. Everywhere we go we have access to our data.
In the next few years, more and more systems (not just Contacts, Calendars, and email), will move to the cloud if they haven’t done so already.
Just look at the success of Apple as an example. It doesn’t matter where I input my data (iPhone, iPad, or Macbook Pro) – it all ends up in the Apple Cloud, then seamlessly syncs with all my devices.
And guess what? It’s amazing.
About the Author:
Steve Schmutz, CEO at Claimwire
Steve is a software entrepreneur specializing in workers’ compensation, insurance, and risk management. He has founded several successful software companies, including Claimwire, a resource for workers’ compensation professionals, and MountainView Software, a leading claims management software system. Steve graduated with a B.S. degree in Business Information Systems from Brigham Young University. Steve lives with his wife in Utah. They have five daughters and 12 grandchildren.