New Delhi, September 25, 2009: Gmail outage puts a question mark on reliability of cloud computing. When Gdrive was announced earlier this year many tech honchos said that it was the end of Hard disk or desktop computer. They said when whole data will be available on the net who will go for hard disk.
But with spate of gmail, Facebook and Twitter outages, many people have started questioning the feasibility and reliability of cloud computing.
Google is planning to release GDrive, its online storage service that goes beyond mere storage. GDrive will enable any device connected to internet to act as PC. In other words, there will not be any need for an operating system as such.
This is also seen as concrete step by the company towards cloud computing and if everythings goes alright and the concept catches on, it will pose a big competition to Microsoft Windows Operating system. Ther is another aspect to GDrive too. The privacy concerns will become more and more pronounced as the core concept of GDrive requires one to keep all the data online.
Gdrive is basically a cloud-based storage that should have two faces: A desktop client that keeps local and online files and folders in two-directional sync via a web interface for accessing your desktop files anywhere and anytime, using any network-enabled computer. In addition, it will come tightly integrated with other Google services to enable editing of supported document types, like spreadsheets and presentations via Google Docs, email via Gmail, images via Picasa Web Albums, etc.
A report on blogs.zdnet.com says, “The GDrive service will provide anyone (who trusts Google with their data) a universally accessible network share that spans across computers, operating systems and even devices. Users will no longer require third party applications to emulate this behaviour by abusing Gmail storage.
—Agencies