Apple iCloud should really be called Apple iSync.

There is a lot of talk about “The Cloud” and it can get pretty confusing to many people. Think of The Cloud as a push by computer companies to get people to run their services from centralised machines rather than on your local computer. This enables software providers to provide software as a service rather than a product for you to install on your computer. Many people already use services in The Cloud. If you use Hotmail, Yahoo mail or Gmail you’re using “The Cloud”. So really it is no big deal. Services were already being delivered via the internet before “The Cloud” came along.

In September Apple will be making its iCloud service available. But really, can this be considered a Cloud service? Not really. It is simply using the internet to provide centralised storage and then to enable attached devices to synchronise the data across devices. Thus my reasoning behind why iCloud should really be called iSync. Apple is about providing devices you carry around with you and from what I can see, they want you to have your data and applications installed on your devices. Nothing wrong with that approach at all. It has many advantages such as local performance is often better than services running on the internet and if you have no connection to the internet you can continue to work offline.

The problem with calling the service iCloud is people will be looking for the Cloud based services which are typical of how others are marketing “The Cloud”. This will confuse people. Of course calling it iSync is really not modern or trendy so let’s just put this down to marketers having poetic licence.

Hopefully that makes it easier for you to see the term Cloud will be used by many organisations in different ways. “The Cloud” sounds far sexier than “The Internet”, but what people really need to do is work out what services are being made available and how they can take advantage of those services. Whether it is called iCloud or iSync doesn’t really matter. It is about what the service will do for you.

Kelvin Eldridge
www.OnlineConnections.com.au