I felt privileged to be at a thought leaders breakfast regarding the personal cloud on Wednesday, which included key members of the Respect Network team.
The respect network is a community of business and people that want to do business together, in a different way, a more respectful way. It’s the security infrastructure, technical infrastructure, legal layers and business infrastructure that houses a series of standards and protocols that allow personal clouds to operate on the network.
I wrote about personal clouds a couple of months ago with an article titled, The personal cloud is about to disrupt the world like the PC did thirty years ago. It’s good to see some mainstream press in Australia covering the topic, even this week with an article about the Respect Network itself.
I admit that it’s a difficult concept to comprehend, as traditional cloud computing wrongly influences the real notion of the personal cloud. There is lots and lots of data generated about me in business dealings, the personal cloud gives you access to that data, you have access to share that data with people and businesses as you see fit. You manage the permission controls. By being able to pull all the data together, this will improve business dealing with real-time automation.
An important factor to learn about personal clouds is that the data can reside anywhere, not just with the ‘host’, for people or business to access the data they have to be part of the network. We will own the personal cloud, our personal cloud, not a vendor like Apple and iCloud. Permission is at the centre of this; it’s all about data sovereignty. The personal cloud is not computing and storage, it’s not a network-attacked storage, it’s not like Drop Box, Evernote or Google drive, these platforms don’t share files with each other. The personal cloud deals with identity, the source code of me!
Like with everything these days, it’s all about customer experience.
Dominic Byrne
