The Cloud and Mobile Devices

Mobile devices—by which I mean smartphones, tablets, and similar compact, Internet-connected gadgets—are largely responsible for the Cloud’s popularity. The device in your pocket may not have enough storage or processing power to perform all your essential computing tasks itself, but the vast array of computers in the Cloud do. As long as you have an Internet connection of some sort, the Cloud lets you stream, edit, and create data of all kinds while on the go. And because the Cloud offers numerous ways to sync data across your devices, you need never be without your crucial information.

In this brief chapter, I look at what makes mobile devices different from conventional computers when it comes to the Cloud—including both the benefits and the limitations of mobile cloud computing.

Mobile Cloud Differences

The Cloud is the Cloud, regardless of how you access it. But when you do so with a mobile device, a few important elements are different:

• Cellular connectivity: Smartphones and many tablets can use cellular data networks to stay connected to the Cloud even when Wi-Fi is unavailable. Because cellular networks have such broad coverage, users can stay connected nearly all the time. Reliable Internet connections like this are great for syncing small chunks of data through the Cloud—it usually happens almost instantly.

  On the downside, the average cellular connection is slower than the average Wi-Fi connection (although this is changing; some LTE networks provide more bandwidth than residential DSL and cable providers in the same area). And data caps—the amount of data your carrier lets you transfer in a given month before incurring an extra fee or other penalties—are typically much lower with cellular data plans than with home broadband service. For these reasons, some devices and apps restrict data-hungry cloud-based activities to Wi-Fi networks.

• Mobile browsers and plug-ins: Despite considerable progress in recent years, mobile browsers can’t do everything that desktop browsers can. To cite a well-worn example, Web browsers on Apple’s iOS devices can’t use Flash-based Web sites. Although these are thankfully becoming fewer and farther between, that limitation means some cloud activities you might otherwise perform on your mobile device have to wait until you’re in front of a conventional computer—or, at best, require complicated workarounds.
• Mobile apps: For many activities, a service-specific app with direct connectivity to the Cloud yields a better experience than a Web page—and, in some cases, it may be your only option due to browser limitations. Fortunately, major cloud media services (such as Hulu Plus, Netflix, and HBO Go) have apps for the most popular mobile platforms. The same is true in most other cloud service categories.

Those aren’t the only differences mobile users experience with the Cloud, though. The story about storage, security, privacy, and backup also changes, as I explain next.

Local vs. Cloud Data Storage

Suppose a cloud storage provider offers you 50 GB of space in the Cloud. If you’re accustomed to using a computer with 4 TB of disk space, 50 GB may seem laughably small. But if your smartphone has only 16 GB of storage, all of a sudden that 50 GB looks like a much more useful figure—you can think of it as more than quadrupling the amount of storage available to your phone. In fact, knowing you have plentiful cloud storage may enable you to consider a laptop or desktop computer with a small but fast SSD (solid-state drive), since you can download or stream data from the Cloud as needed.

Media (such as movies and music) provides the simplest and clearest example of how cloud storage benefits mobile users. You buy albums from Amazon or movies from iTunes, and even if the media adds up to tens of gigabytes, you can enjoy it on your smartphone or tablet by streaming it—that is, playing it (nearly) live as it’s being downloaded from the Cloud, but without storing a copy on your device. Or, if it’s something you expect to watch or listen to frequently, you can download a copy, consume it as desired, and then delete it if you need to free up space—all the while knowing that you can always fetch it from the Cloud again later.

Backups are another example. I have something like a terabyte of data from one of my Macs backed up to CrashPlan’s cloud storage. Although I couldn’t restore all that data to my iPhone at once, I can use CrashPlan’s iOS app to restore any particular file I may need to my phone. Having all that data accessible remotely is more convenient than, and generally just as useful as, having a complete copy of it on a mobile device.

So, cloud storage and mobile devices sound like a match made in heaven, or at least the upper atmosphere. But, predictably, this arrangement comes with some qualifications. The most serious, as I mentioned in the previous topic, is the limited bandwidth and monthly data usage caps in most mobile plans. (For that matter, even your home broadband connection may have a data cap that your mobile device could bump into if used frequently enough over Wi-Fi.) It’s great that I can stream all the Star Trek movies (collectively, about 55 GB in HD format) to my iPad, but if my cellular carrier offers only 4 GB of data transfer per month before imposing hefty fees, that could be the final frontier for my bank account.

Security and Privacy with Mobile Devices

Everything I’ve said so far about Privacy and Security in the Cloud applies to mobile devices too. But there’s an extra element. Mobile devices are more likely than conventional computers to be used on untrusted Wi-Fi networks, and far more likely to use cellular networks. Although individual services may encrypt data on the device or in transit, the only way to ensure protection of your entire Internet connection is to use a VPN (see Protecting Data in Transit). That requires extra effort, expense, and attentiveness.

Backups and Mobile Devices

Most mobile devices offer some built-in mechanism for backing up the data on your device—either to a computer or to the Cloud. (For example, you can back up iOS devices to iCloud or to a Mac or PC running iTunes.) That’s extremely important, of course, and I urge you to consult the documentation for your mobile devices to figure out how to enable backups in whichever way you choose.

But note that since much of the data your mobile device uses is already stored in the Cloud, the only data that’s truly essential to back up is that which exists only on the device—for example, photos and videos you shoot, documents and settings for the apps you use, and any other personal data that isn’t already synced to the Cloud and to your other devices in some way.

Be aware, as well, that mobile backups may offer less granularity than desktop backups. For example, if you back up your iPhone to iCloud, you can later restore the whole thing if need be, but you can’t restore just a single file that goes missing. It’s all or nothing.