Cloud computing is a recent online phenomenon, now utilized by pretty much every agency and business in the United States. While the premises of the plan and system sound promising, it actually holds a lot of security issues and other problems.

We’ll start off with the positives though. Cloud computing is the practice of storing the information in a “cloud” rather than on a hard drive or computer. These clouds usually refer to some place on the Internet. For example, rather than storing all of its clients profiles, passwords, user names, etc. on their personal servers, social networking sites like MySpace or FaceBook could simply save all of the information on the Internet. This eliminates much of the cost of securing and encrypting the information themselves, which allows the site to keep more of its revenue, and possibly add more features as it sees fit. Another thing to consider is the ergonomics of such a system; rather than storing the required information on a huge expanse of many computers, the information and data could be stored on maybe one computer, using about half of the space, as half is directly put to the Internet.