How Deep You Are into Clouds.
We are trying to get deeper in cloud computing without sometime even realizing it. Cloud computing is going to touch our lives very closely in coming years may be months. So I popped up this question to my buddies and colleagues. Some were aware and some even not aware but on digging deep they acknowledged how much they are relying on to the clouds without even realizing. Today we almost have forgotten to write diaries we just blog, we don’t call up our friends, we just tweet. We have forgotten the old practice of having social get together, we just meet online through social networks.
Cloud will bring radical changes in to our lives. We wont have to buy expensive software, we will just hook up with internet and will have access to reliable applications on cloud. Our worries on security and upgrades will be a thing of past as these issues will be take care of by our service providers.
But what has still not been properly addressed is the issue of identity theft and data piracy. Once you have your applications on clouds, the service providers will have full access to what you store online. Whatever assurances they may give but there will be one fear lurking at the back of your head about security issues. This is one issue which if can be addressed properly, I feel migration of users to cloud would be much faster.
We don’t recommend at this moment that you transfer your complete life data on to the clouds but surely, you can start experimenting and building your own cloud bit by bit.
So what are the options available. We would list down here some of the popular desktop applications and their cloud counterparts.
Microsoft Word or Zoho or Google Documents:
Anyone and everyone who uses computers uses Microsoft Word. This is the popular word processing applications from Microsoft stable. Zoho, no doubt is the complete online office suite available presently and it provides hosts of applications like word processor, spreadsheets, presentation tool, note taker, organizer, project management etc. Zoho also offers pluggins for MS Office, Outlook, IE and Firefox which enables you to move documents out of cloud so that you are not stuck.
Preezo for PowerPoint.
Preezo is an online web application to create and share presentations. You would need this if you don’t want to get associated with ZOHO family for all your applications.
Gmail for Microsoft Outlook:
The first thing which all executives do in the morning is to open their Microsoft outlook. But to live in cloud there is an equally interesting alternative today. In fact for quite sometime now.
EditGrid, Google Docs for EXCEL:
Though MS Excel is quite advanced and rich in features and today no applications comes close to Excel in terms of features it provides but still EditGrid is an worthy second option.
Splashup for Adobe Photoshop:
Again not in the same league but there are cloud option available where one can create, edit and store their files.
