For the last few years, I've worked at a company (Desktone, Inc.) that provides virtual desktops as a service. Now, virtual servers have been around for some time, but virtual desktops are just starting to catch on. Having used a virtual desktop for the last three years, I can say that it's been a great experience. I used to bring my laptop home with me every night on other jobs. But at Desktone, except for the first couple of weeks (before I broke the habit), I never brought my laptop home with me, because I could always access my virtual desktop from home, or from my mom's house, or wherever I happened to be. My desktop was in the cloud, and as long as I had Internet access, I could reach my desktop (and my data).
Some things about computing you don't learn until you don't have them. For example, when the network goes down, you realize how important it is to your work. No network, no connection to web sites, Google, blogs, or your virtual machine. I used to assume that the machine itself was important too. But with a virtual desktop, there's no physical box -- no desktop or laptop to lug around (even though your virtual desktop does live somewhere on a real server in a data center). I did not miss the physical machine one bit.
The other important element of personal computing is storage. Where's my stuff? With a virtual machine, my data could be on the local disk (C: drive) of the virtual desktop, or it could be on a network share of some sort, mapped to My Documents (yes, we're talking Windows desktops here, but this could apply to any OS). Or, my data could really be in the cloud, on a disk or storage system somewhere far from the virtual desktop.
There are a number of companies that market services for cloud storage or backup. The best I've come across so far is Dropbox. Dropbox gives you 2GB of storage for free, and you can download a client for Windows or Linux systems (I have not tried it yet on my Ubuntu systems Update: I installed the Ubuntu Dropbox client, and it works great). The great thing about Dropbox is that it shows up as a folder (directory) in your file system. So you can have it under My Documents or /home/user or wherever, and when you save a file there, it saves it on your local machine and also in the cloud. But the best thing about Dropbox is that it synchronizes the files in your dropbox to any other machine that has mounted that dropbox. No more emailing files to yourself or using USB zip drives to transfer files.
I think that storage is going to be the big story in cloud computing, because user data is the most important thing to individuals and companies. Whether it's photographs, music, and videos, or spreadsheets, databases, and Power Point presentations, it's the data that defines. Whoever can come up with a cloud storage solution that is secure, simple, and inexpensive will have a strong business as data storage needs grow rapidly.
Update (9/29/2011): Since I originally wrote this post, Dropbox did have an incident where they left open access to storage accounts. Keep in mind that no matter how much you trust your cloud storage provider, you data is on their disk drives. For most of us, this is probably more secure than it is on our own drives, but it is an important consideration.
