Can wireless networks support the promise of the 'cloud'?

Google, Apple, and Amazon are pushing more and more of your entertainment, your data -- heck, your life -- into the cloud. But what's it mean for the wireless network operators who are already struggling to keep up with heavy data demand?

Each of these companies recently announced new digital storage services for music. The idea is that people can put their music in the "cloud," which is really a remote data center. The "cloud" becomes the central repository for all of your music, pictures, and other data. And you simply connect to it via any broadband connection available to access it.

There are plenty of benefits to this, of course. For one, it's incredibly convenient, especially when you're connecting wirelessly. As Apple CEO Steve Jobs pointed out during his keynote earlier this week where the iiCloud service was announced, he said that it will eliminate the headache of syncing each device.

But using these services will no doubt eat up a lot more bandwidth than just downloading a song one time to your computer or smartphone. Once music moves to the cloud, you could be downloading that same song every time you sync your device or even every time you listen to it. And once Apple or Google start offering video in the cloud, the problem may get even worse.

Can wireless networks, which are already buckling under the load of simple mobile browsing, handle it?

That's the big question.

"The tonnage of traffic on the network is growing," said Fared Adib, vice president of product development for Sprint Nextel. "That's an issue we [wireless service providers] are dealing with. And I think it's too early to say how the cloud services will affect all of us. As an industry, the ecosystem needs to work together on these issues."

Heavy data loads
Indeed, wireless carriers are already feeling the pain of consumers' increasing appetite for wireless data. AT&T has become the poster-child for carriers struggling to keep up with heavy loads. AT&T, which used to be the exclusive carrier for the iPhone, has said publicly that the company's data traffic on its network has increased 8,000 percent over the past four years.

AT&T Chief Executive Randall Stephenson said at the Telecommunications Industry Association 2011 conference last month that by 2015, AT&T will handle as much wireless data in a month and a half as it did in all of 2010.

Stephenson said the only way to accommodate that kind of growth is to add more spectrum to its network. In addition to asking the Federal Communications Commission to open up more spectrum, AT&T also plans to spend $39 billion to buy T-Mobile USA to get access to more spectrum in dense urban areas, like New York City.

Without T-Mobile's spectrum, AT&T has said that consumers will not see improvements in dropped calls, faster speed networks, or improved access to "state-of-the-art mobile broadband Internet service."

While AT&T may be the most vocal right now about its network capacity constraints, there is growing data to suggest that other wireless operators will also be challenged in the future. Network equipment maker Cisco Systems said recently in a report that worldwide data traffic in 2010 just on mobile devices was three times all global Internet traffic in 2000.

Internet traffic in general is expected to quadruple over the next four years. And by 2015, Cisco estimates that the amount of traffic traversing the Internet will reach 966 exabytes per year. Between 2014 and 2015 network traffic is expected to grow by 200 exabytes, more than the total amount of Internet traffic generated worldwide in 2010.

A large contributor to this growth is a surge in network-connected devices. This includes everything from smartphones to notebooks to tablets to home appliances. On average, a U.S. consumer will likely have seven connected devices by 2015.

And if Apple, Google, and Amazon have their way, many of these consumers will be using cloud-based services to share their content among their multiple devices.

Working together
While it appears that Google, Apple, and Amazon may be on a collision course with wireless carriers, it's in everyone's best interest for the two sides to work together. And it seems like they are.

"The sense we've gotten from working with Google is that they get it," said Sprint's Adib. "They know we have to balance the traffic loads with the service they're trying to offer. And the truth is none of us want the consumer to have a bad experience."

Indeed at the e-G8 Forum in Paris last month, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt said wireless operators and content companies are "incredibly co-dependent." He added that the two groups can work together to spread out data demand to ensure these networks aren't overloaded.

Using Wi-Fi to offload heavy traffic loads is one solution. The cloud services that have already been introduced rely heavily on Wi-Fi networks to provide the network connection between devices and the "cloud."

"Doing the bulk of uploads via Wi-Fi will help alleviate some of the network issues," said Ross Rubin, an analyst with NPD Group.

Sprint's Adib agreed. He said that nearly 80 percent of mobile data usage on its network is done by subscribers at home or in the office, where Wi-Fi is typically available. He said that the company is working on ways to make discovering and connecting to these networks easier so that devices do it automatically and seamlessly. For now the company doesn't have anything to announce, but it's working with its device partners to come up with better solutions.

But Adib said concerns about "cloud" services may be slightly overblown. While it's true consumers may be downloading or syncing content more frequently from their digital "lockers" in the cloud, he doesn't believe people will stream content constantly.

"These cloud service are about making sure that people get access to their content on multiple devices," he said. "And that's a good thing for carriers. We want people using more than one device."

In the end, carriers benefit from these new services, and companies such as Apple and Google also depend on the increasing capacity and reliability of wireless networks.

"There is no question that Google and Apple would like to treat bandwidth as unlimited," said Charles Golvin an analyst with Forrester Research. "But carriers increasingly aren't able to provide that. But neither one wants to frustrate consumers. So they must figure out a way to work together."

5 practical steps to keep your data secure in the cloud

Apple’s announcement of iCloud today is yet more evidence of the unstoppable migration of data and assets to the cloud. Despite the shocking recent breaches of security at a variety of organizations, including the multiple breaches that have afflicted millions of Sony customers, more and more of us are entrusting personal or business assets to the cloud. This is an irreversible trend. It’s not going to stop.

Yet many of us remain naive about the necessary steps we should take to keep our online assets secure. I’m not talking about excessively geeky ways to preserve your online safety. Just following these five simple guidelines will go a long way towards helping the average man or woman at work and play to keep online threats at bay.

1. Don’t take security for granted

There are two routes to your online assets. One is through the cloud provider’s infrastructure, and as the headlines constantly remind us, even household names don’t always do everything they should to keep your secrets safe. But the second route is even more potent, and it’s much closer to home. The easiest and most prevalent route for an intruder to access your online records is through your login details. Of course you need your provider to be secure, but don’t let that make you careless about your own login details.

2. Use strong, memorable passwords

The trouble with making up strong passwords is that they’re not memorable. The trick is to start with something memorable and then turn it into a strong password — which means mixing numbers, letters, lower and upper case, maybe a few symbols as well. What do you already know from memory that jumbles up all these different types of characters? Start with addresses, car license numbers, telephone numbers, dates of birth. But don’t use your own — use people you know; friends, employers, parents, partners, previous addresses; or old addresses of your own and cars you sold a decade ago. Anything that can’t be linked to your online persona but always jumble it up — half a zipcode, a name with part of a birthdate, segments of an address. Then add in a dash, an exclamation mark or an @ sign to spice it up some more.

3. Guard the crown jewels of your inbox

Of course you’re going to reuse passwords, especially for sites where you’re not storing crucial data like your credit card numbers, date and place of birth, address or social security number. But there’s one site where you should always use a unique and strongest possible password — your email inbox. Because this is the one place where all your other logins redirect to when you reset a password. This one location is the passport to all your other online assets.

Although it’s a hassle to do so, you should consider double-protecting your inbox with two-factor authentication, which means you have to enter a secondary code (for example a code sent by SMS to your mobile phone) to get access. This is especially important if you have a habit of visiting malicious websites, you never remember to keep your anti-malware software up to date, or you have a track record of failing to recognize phishing emails.

4. Don’t leave the password recovery back door ajar

Very often, people take all kinds of precautions to protect their login information but make it really easy to reset their password through the password recovery mechanism. If your user ID is totally easy to guess (it’s often your email) then don’t use something obvious or easy to discover for your password reset, such as your date or place of birth, mother or wife’s maiden name or some other readily sourced personal information. That’s as lame as leaving your doorkey under the front doormat.

5. Have an alternate to fall back on

Security is all about risk mitigation, and however careful your planning, you can’t eliminate all risk. So give yourself a fallback. Don’t put all your cash in one online account, have a separate emergency email address, make sure you’ve got a 3G card or local Starbucks you can resort to if your main Internet connection goes down. Knowing that you’ve got a second option if the worst happens helps you keep a cool head in an emergency, which gives you a better chance of surviving a crisis.

Apple, Jobs to talk iCloud at WWDC

Apple is kicking off its Worldwide Developers Conference next week with the unveiling of its cloud-based service, iCloud.

Next Monday, Apple will hold its keynote address before a packed house at the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. In addition to iCloud, Apple said that it will detail its next-generation desktop operating system,Mac OS X Lion, as well as iOS 5, the next version of the mobile operating system running on its iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch.

The company also indicated in its press release that CEO Steve Jobs, who is on an indefinite medical leave, will participate in WWDC.

Apple stopped short of providing specifics about Cloud in this morning's announcement. However, details and intimations surrounding the launch of such an offering have been cropping up for quite some time, at the very least since Apple acquired online music-streaming service Lala a year and a half ago.

In January, music industry sourced told that they were in talks with Apple for a cloud-based, streaming music service that would allow users to listen to their tracks over the Web on computers and Apple's mobile devices.

Apple had signed a cloud music licensing agreement with EMI music and was closing in on deals with Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment. The company had already reached a cloud deal with Warner Music.

In today's annoucement, Apple did not specifically say that its iCloud service will resolve around music, referring to it tersely as a 'cloud services offering," more than one function.