Security & Access.

Without a connection, whom you are reliant on third party infrastructure for, you could be left with zero access to apps or data – unless you mirror it to a desktop solution, which then renders cloud computing pointless.

Secondly, there are major security issues with full-time access to web-apps. With the rise of Wifi sniffers, and corporate sabotage, it would open previously ring-fenced systems to a degree of exposure. Not to mention the ease of identify theft with the average consumer leaving their lifes data on internet based machines.

Thin clients within organisations have been around for decades, with servers doing the bulk of the work (look at the CAD and large-scale video-editing environments). The main difference between this setup and the cloud is that each thin client/server model is ring-fenced in a local network as opposed to being in the larger ‘cloud’.

The future of this model will certainly have its up and downs, and it will be interesting to see how it handels the main issues.