PC to PCC – Is it Inevitable?

Transition from Personal Computer (PC) to Personal Cloud Computing (PCC)- Is the change on its way?  It’s my opinion that personal computing is destined for the cloud in coming decades inspite of the fact that there is lot of debate surrounding cloud security and privacy. Here are few reasons for this belief

Storing information on traditional PCs / notebooks is secure as long as you do not connect them to internet. In this age of collaboration and social networking, we connect these personal devices all the time to internet. More often than not, the documents, photos, spreadsheets, emails, bookmarks, etc we create on our local PC is shared in some form or another with our social or professional colleagues, and managed somewhere in the cloud. Are we giving ourselves a mere erroneous perception of security by keeping these artifacts locally?

In my work career of 10 years, I have purchased 4 desktops/ laptops so far. Talk to a computer hardware maintenance division head of your IT company and you will be surprised to find the investment they make every year just to maintain/upgrade the currently running PCs in the company. Now envision a cloud based service provider there who offers one of thousands of virtualized, metered, capacity-on-demand PCC services. Your PCC never needs to be replaced or upgraded, and you can switch provider at your will.

How many times in a highly demanding workday have you felt the need of modifying the same presentation from your office laptops, home PCs, handheld mobile devices and other internet enabled devices. Would it have made work easier if this presentation lived in the personal cloud? You wouldn’t have worried about maintaining a persistent logical ‘session state’ across the array of digital devices you own.

Watch this video on Pogoplug- A device you can use to create your own personal cloud for your connected life.


So what do you think? Is this seamless, anytime, anywhere access to a personalized virtual computing instance is in our future. Leave me a note if you think there are that will stop its adoption in coming decade.

image credit:Ted Haeger