{"id":579610,"date":"2010-05-26T13:03:32","date_gmt":"2010-05-26T17:03:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/webworkerdaily.com\/?p=33401"},"modified":"2010-05-26T13:03:32","modified_gmt":"2010-05-26T17:03:32","slug":"open-thread-how-has-cloud-computing-changed-the-way-you-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/579610","title":{"rendered":"Open Thread: How Has Cloud Computing Changed the Way You Work?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Next month will see our cloud computing conference, Structure<\/a>, return for its third year, which got me thinking about the impact of cloud computing on my <\/em>web working.<\/p>\n

Coupled with the increase in Internet bandwidth, cloud computing has facilitated the development of many of the fantastic web apps that I use and love today as services like Amazon’s EC2 and S3<\/a> and Google’s App Engine<\/a> has lowered the app vendors’ startup costs and provided reliable scalability for when their user bases grow.<\/p>\n

When it comes to mobility and collaboration, cloud computing has delivered advances that I already take for granted. Because I primarily work in the cloud, I can access my work from anywhere, using a multitude of devices. This is beneficial beyond just being able to hop between a desktop machine and a laptop. When most of one’s tools live online, switching from PC to Mac (or vice versa) is much less burdensome than it could have been in the past<\/a>. And if I suddenly found that my main laptop had died, my Time Machine backup was corrupted and I only had in iPad\u00a0 to work on — as happened to designer Shane Pearlman recently — it wouldn’t be an absolute disaster<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Having my work available online makes collaboration far easier than it ever was before. Rather than emailing files to my colleagues and trying (and failing) to keep track of all the different versions, using a tool like Google Docs means I can have one<\/em> document that everyone can access — it’s even possible to have more than one person editing that document at any one time, if I wish. Couple that kind of access with project management and corporate social networking features and collaboration with the rest of my team, which is spread all over the globe, is a snap. And developers have seemingly only scratched the surface of the collaborative possibilities.<\/p>\n