Look up on a summer day and you will probably see one of these.. It is a white fluffy cloud, beneficial in that it will shade you from direct sunlight as it drifts across the face of the sun. White clouds have a friendly air about them,

Dark clouds are not overly friendly. They rain on parades, make it difficult to get from your car to the grocery store entrance and back. They are beneficial too in as much as they bring water to plant life and fill up lakes etc.

Truth is that both types can be really good or a total pain, and it is easy to tell just by looking at the colour and visible density which side of the line they are on.

Computer clouds are not visible in the same way. You know that the cloud is ok when you can still see and access your data, but you will never get a forecast which will tell you when it is going to turn bad.

Data security is hard enough to maintain at a local level. Giving it to persons unknown and having it stored ‘off shore’ seems to be a recipe for disaster, an accident looking for somewhere to happen.

Today, Apple announce the iCloud, and many will want to sign up, but it is still a cloud you can’t see and for which there will never be a forecast. Call me old-fashioned if want, but this push to remote places could backfire big time. Like the Great Canadian Winter, there are variables way outside of our control, and none of them have feelings or any sense of moral duty.

I will not be signing up for a computer cloud anytime soon. Not happening..