By Estelle Akofio-Sowah Welcome to the cloud generation. You may not realise that you have joined it but the chances are that you have. If you use email, have a blog, have posted photos online or have searched for information on the Internet then you have gained your membership to a new era in computing. If all of the above is alien to you then fear not –we’re on the cusp of a change that every student, consumer, employee and business can be part of. As in art, music and popular culture, the world of technology has movements and phases and we’re about to enter a new one. ‘Cloud computing’ at its core is about information being available anywhere and everywhere because of the Web. It’s about bringing products and services online which will change the way you work and play. But most of all it’s about people. The Internet has been around for some time, of course. We’ve now grown accustomed to how a simple search can help you discover new places, contacts, music, books and nuggets of information that may otherwise have remained closed to you. As we’ve gone on our collective voyage of discovery, we’ve started to bump into others and struck up conversations with people, often in other parts of the world. More to the point, we’ve found that this online network of people is not only useful but thrilling – we’re all inherently sociable creatures and we need to interact with and work with others in order to get things done. The trouble is that computers have perhaps been an obstacle in the way of our desire to communicate with others. We have been tied to the information that resides on our own personal computers or on our company network. If you wanted to actually share a thesis with a fellow academic, or work with a colleague in an overseas office on a customer proposal you were limited to sending attachments on email and getting embroiled in a confusing array of edits, highlights and multiple versions of the same document. All that, however, is set to change. Cloud computing moves all of that information - emails, documents, presentations, photos, spreadsheets and so on – onto the Internet where it exists in a virtual space which we refer to as ‘the cloud’. By having all this information reside online, you instantly become more flexible, more productive and more collaborative in the way you do things. Imagine the life of a University student today. The chances are they will be working on projects which require input from fellow students, professors and other third parties. That work needs to continue at home or perhaps in an Internet café. Cloud computing makes it easier to do this – since the project resides online, students can access their work from any device, wherever they might be. They can also invite others to share their document, presentation or spreadsheet to collaborate on the project at the same time. Meanwhile in the business world, an accountant in Ghana chats with her colleague in London as they work on the same spreadsheet. A team of designers around the world meet on a single document in the cloud to plan their next product. This is life in the cloud. The same principle applies to organising your daily life. Had a party? Great, post the pictures up online for all to see. Going overseas on a trip? Lucky you – set up a blog so that friends and family can keep track of your travels. Organising a wedding? Congratulations – share the guest list with your parents on a spreadsheet and let them handle the acceptances while you check in every so often online. The point of all this is that the web is everywhere and that breaks down barriers of time, space and geography. The increasing interactivity of the cloud creates a worldwide conversation, a multi-dimensional collaboration that seems endlessly possible. This kind of communication itself becomes revolutionary: borders dissolve when ideas are shared rather than hoarded, made visible rather than kept hidden. Of course not everyone is convinced that cloud computing is the way forward just yet. There are natural concerns around keeping all your data online and how that information is protected. However, we faced the same scenario when people recognised that it was safer to keep their money in a bank rather than under their mattress. As the Web becomes the platform for so many things in our lives, cloud computing represents a natural progression. However, it’s up to companies like Google (who run our own worldwide operations entirely from the cloud) to reassure you that your data is in safe hands. So, what does the future hold? For the last fifteen years or so, cloud computing has been spreading and improving, and no one can predict exactly where it will take us. As the movement into the cloud continues to push us forward, what's clear is that our lives as consumers, as business people, and as citizens are already changing. Access to information is a democratising force, and the cloud makes it inexpensive and easy to collaborate and share information. In business, that means that even the smallest companies can now have as big a presence online as a multinational corporation. For individuals it means using the Web for daily tasks to make more time for the important things in life. Innovations in information creation and distribution are already challenging traditional notions and boundaries of how we manage our personal lives and how we work. It can help those of us who need to plan our hectic family lives, organise holidays, manage sports teams and much more. The revolution may have started in a garage in California, but it has already crossed every border, moving as freely around the globe as, well, a cloud.