Whew.  WHAT a week.  For those who don’t know, the Central Ohio area where I live had a huge problem with the remnants of Ike.  Last Sunday, we experienced sustained tropical force winds and gusts to hurricane force.  Needless to say, many houses were damaged, trees broken and infrastructure affected.  This includes the Cable infrastructure as well as the phone infrastructure.  While my house never lost power, we had sporadic cable through the week.  Even 6 days later, we had the cable drop out for hours as the power company took down the power that affects the distribution points along Time Warner’s network to make repairs.

The world seems to be moving to the cloud.  Applications such as Google Docs, Google Calendar, Zoho and others make it easy to get to your data from anywhere.  Anywhere so long as you have a connection.  Fortunately, data I really needed for the moment wasn’t on the cloud.  It was on my desktop.  Does this mean cloud computing is a failure?  I don’t think so. 

First, tools like Google Gears will eventually make it much easier to live in the cloud but still have data that you can get to when your internet connection drops.  Google Gears even works on multiple operating systems.  It also will let you stack up some stories to read in Google Reader when you’re offline.  Gears only solves part of it.  Not everything is Gears enabled yet.

Second, storage solutions like Amazon S3 and others will let you have a piece of storage in the cloud.  This isn’t that great if the only copy of a document you have is only on the online storage.  I recommend using other tools like rsync on UNIX operating systems, S3 Backup or Jungle Disk to automate the syncing of your data to your storage on Amazon’s S3 storage.

What I am getting at is that your cloud applications should all have a way to get data in and out of them to create backup copies of your data so that if you are disconnected, you can still get to the data you need right away, regardless of the connectivity situation.

Our infrastructure is still very vulnerable to failure.  We get complacent and used to it always being there, and that makes working in the cloud so compelling.  Then, all of a sudden, a big windstorm knocks out your only connection to the world.  Can you get your job done?  Confidently I say I can.  While I do live in the cloud with some of my stuff, it’s not critical data. Data I need to use on a daily basis may be backed up to the cloud, but is stored locally.

Until the infrastructure is improved, that’s the only solution.  Cloud computing isn’t the end all be all, it’s merely a tool.  A tool that makes it very easy to get to your data from anywhere and to keep it in sync. Just make sure you also can keep it locally so if you have no internet for a week, your still productive.