Cloud Computing is the new buzz word. It’s all over the place as people believe that in the future desktop apps will be replaced by web apps. Instead of having Word and Excel installed on your local system, you will use something like Google Docs to create and edit your files. Instead of using Oulook you will keep all your emails in a web based email solution like Gmail.
For mobile workers like me this is ideal. No matter where I am working I would be able to access the apps I usually use and the data I need to work with. But putting my other hat on, that of IT admin and data security ‘expert’ it’s a bad thing. With cloud computing you lose control of your data and your what your users are actually doing with it because the apps and the data are no longer on your server. You cant track who is doing what and you cant effectively back up your data because it is stored on somebody else’s server.
The obvious answer to this is to host the Cloud Apps on your own web server. That’s where Tonido comes in. Tonido is a browser based operating system, or web OS, that runs on your server rather than some third party server.
It comes with a host of apps installed on it such as PIM, photo sharing, browser based media player and even the ability to share a folder on your own Tonido network but the data is still stored locally, no longer are you relying on some third party supplier having a secure data center.