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.

Now we’ll examine the downsides, and the detriments are much more prevalent than the positives. Instead of the information being stored on their own computers, these sites and companies now store them on the Internet in cloud computing. Think about the security risks of this; if you keep your car in a random parking lot to conserve space in your garage, how safe do you think your car will be? Likely, you could come back to visit your car to find that everything has been stolen out of it; or if you are quite unlucky, perhaps the car isn’t there at all anymore. The principles are the same, these companies’ are leaving the information much more unprotected when they don’t secure them themselves. Who knows who is actually securing, let alone encrypting these servers? These massive conduits could be being hacked by just about anyone, and this is what has seemed to happen.

Now even our government is storing their information of national security on these clouds. While it is an economical practice, we need to be careful about what kind of information is stored there. Any mundane boring stuff can be filed away unchecked in the cloud computing system, but anything of value or a threat to one’s security should be kept safe and secure.

Since the average person has no say in where their data goes and how well it is encrypted, or who tries to hack it, you have to be proactive and seek the power to do so from outside sources. Using a change IP proxy server can keep you safe and anonymous on the Internet. This anonymous browsing can actually encrypt your data, so at least you can make sure your information is safe. Using an IP Changer can preemptively eliminate many privacy issues you can face online.

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