Battling the Fear of Heights: Pros and Cons of the 'Personal Cloud'

The ever-evolving technological world is undergoing a paradigm shift. After the older generations of the mainframe, the PC, the client-server architectures and the web, the fifth generation of computing now ushers itself in. Cloud computing has become the buzzword of the day and is being hailed by many as the technology of tomorrow. But despite its wide popularity and partial implementation and adoption in many companies with an avalanche of gray literature available, the concept of 'cloud computing' remains considerably shroud amidst ambiguity and vagueness. Almost every other article on cloud computing seems to have its own conception of the cloud. The first half of this paper tries to analyze the reason behind this situation. The second and main part of this paper focuses on the extended concept of the 'personal cloud'. Cloud computing is, no doubt, an excellent paradigm for enterprise computing but this paper considers the other side of the equation -- personal computing. Personal cloud computing services on a commercial basis abound on the web but in this paper we consider in depth whether cloud computing is really all that compatible to personal computing, if at all.