Weekly Readings: Cloud Computing and Mobility
In the first week of this course, I scanned down the list of topics we would be covering and this one (Cloud Computing) was one I did not recognize. After this week’s readings, I realize that I have been using cloud computing for a while now without putting a name on it. It just seemed to me to be a natural evolution of the properties of the Internet. The readings, however, talked not just about individuals using cloud computing, but institutions and that was really interesting to me.
One of the things that was interesting about this week’s readings was that one of the drivers for institutions to use cloud computing is cost reduction. 7 Things You Should Know about Cloud Computing and Library Cloud Atlas: A Guide to Cloud Computing and Storage both mention that there are savings to be had for institutions that “rent” applications or space rather than spend large amounts of capital. Some of the examples were of very small institutions, but I believe in this economy, large institutions should be interested in this, too (though their cost savings might not be so large). These ideas were all new to me, but very intriguing.
Some of the articles brought up the major issues around cloud computing which, I think, might mean that we aren’t “quite there yet”. In 7 Things they mentioned “concerns about privacy, security, data integrity, intellectual property management, audit trails, and other issues.” Other readings also mention these issues and those are pretty serious issues! One of the speakers in What is Cloud Computing? also mentioned the issue of bandwidth – you need a significant amount of it to move all your work to the clouds. So, all in all, it might be a little while before all these things are worked out and we can all feel comfortable in the clouds.
This leads us to libraries. How does cloud computing affect what we’re doing? We will obviously need to provide “the fastest connections [we] can, and security measures that do not block access to what users want”, according to Michael Stephens. And, on the related topic of mobile computing, we also need to encourage our users to access the library in ways that they are already using (texting, mobile websites). I liked Steve Kolwich’s point that “college libraries should not be picky about how they are willing to communicate with students” – we should just be excited that they want to contact us at all rather than doing a Google search.