Sync before you act - the future of the cloud

About two years ago, my trusty MacBook Air decided - from one day to another - never to start again. My Mac doctor sadly affirmed its death the next day. Warranty on the device had just run out, and I was understandably less than happy to find that the only life-saving operation - replacing the mainboard - would cost me as much as a brand new device. More importantly, it dawned on me that my entire data would be lost until I found a specialist to help me recover my files from the SSD which (you guessed) was mounted on the main board. Until I realised, that is, that all my important files were in my dropbox folder. This did not just save me the specialist, it led to an epiphany: Without knowing it, I had pretty much transitioned my entire workflow into the cloud.


Same story for my iPhone, email and music - instead of browsing my thousands of MP3's, I moved to almost exclusively streaming the tunes I listened to daily. Also, all my notes lived in Evernote. Whenever I was looking to transfer large files to people, I'd send them a link to my cloud storage. Any occasion a file went missing or corrupted, I'd turn to the cloud for an intact previous version. While traditional file backups are tedious as you know, the cloud offers a much more elegant and seamless recovery option. If you were to ask me, the best new technologies are those which work their magic in the background, without you even noticing. That's precisely how I feel about cloud applications, and this is what I love about great technology - it makes life easier, simpler and a little more beautiful.


My daily app usage gave away what I had only just realised: How reliant I had become on cloud applications in my life. And, that whilst this came with plenty of benefits, heavy daily usage also had quite a number of drawbacks. The most painful of which, no question, was always the syncing process. Due to the inherent complexity of multiple end notes accessing files and the greatly varying speeds of data connections (especially on mobile), synchronising across devices is an incredibly demanding task. That's exactly why it fails so frequently: I see myself clearing out conflicting notes in Evernote almost on a daily basis, and somehow nobody on our office cloud drive ever has had access to exactly the same amount and version of files. This leads to a great deal of confusion, re-work and file recovery. But at the same time, going back to a work environment without cloud is almost unthinkable to me.


The utility of cloud applications is undeniably high despite its very evident flaws, yet it could be so much higher still if the main bottleneck and pain point of syncing were resolved with a more suitable approach. We’ve cracked this on the front of individual documents, but not on a system level. Tools like Google docs and Office online have shown that principles of live interaction, just like in web based multiplayer games, can work magnificently in a virtual team collaboration context. Visual cloud whiteboards like spacedeck exemplify the possibilities of taking effective offline teamwork methodologies into a digital environment. On another end of the spectrum apps like trello, basecamp and slack are all great integrators that bring together several cloud applications and create a team workflow. This means it’s technically possible to work purely in the cloud.
Yet, despite all this progress on the UX front, the core problem of cloud applications - those aforementioned clumsy sync processes - are still around and haven’t been solved.

How come we have yet to address this most fundamental of issues? A hypothesis is that we are caught in a system of desktop thinking: We're still storing and categorising dynamic, interactive content in static lists, i.e. file and folder structures. A good example of this are file systems in cloud drives. There’s no reason why these need to be static, as computing and file reading and writing power of modern computers and broadband internet connections is easily capable of a folder structure that is constantly changing. Which makes me ask, why can't each user of a shared cloud storage solution organise all the files in the shared cloud drive in his/her own folder structure? In the same way that we all have our own playlists in spotify, yet the music obviously links to the same files on the spotify servers. It’s less a problem of technical realisation than of longstanding habit - much like the inefficient but ubiquitous QWERTY keyboard we are stuck with on most devices today. By mimicking local storing of files, most cloud applications resemble work environments we were used to before cloud computing. This is where a shift needs to occur, and I’m glad to see solutions are moving into a new direction. Take this kickstarter campaign, for example.

Rather than sync all files by default and allowing users to opt out, it’s more likely that we will only store file links locally in the future. All software we use daily will have to be web-based and ready for simultaneous collaboration: Browsers will become our new desktops (sure you’ve heard that one before!)
Moreover, with all the rave about AI, I’m extremely surprised we have yet to apply this technology to cloud collaboration. A simple example. When I use dropbox for iOS, I always look for the same files. What I'd like to see when I open the app is only these files, with the option to search my entire drive as necessary. I envision the same for my desktop cloud storage - a list of links to the files I frequently use, and an intelligent contextual search engine for everything else. So, if you’ve heard that mobile and desktop, web browsing and desktop work will increasingly converge, a shift to cloud in everything we do is a main driving force behind this.

It’s crucial that we graduate from antiquated ways of organising files as we make this shift. Sync processes in the future shouldn’t just ensure that every device has the latest copy of all shared files and folders, but learn our usage patterns and help us find the stuff we actually need at the given moment. Tell me big data analytics can't do that already - if you've ever wondered how Google finds exactly what you're looking for, it's not like they're guessing... but back to the cloud, and its future in our work and private lives.

Rather than manually syncing our applications just to be safe, or wasting time clearing out file duplicates, the cloud should enable us to replace the traditional sequence of creating locally and then sharing or editing online with a completely web-based workflow. At the same time, the possibilities that come with it should drive us to rethink the static ways in which we have always structured and displayed files to resemble a more dynamic and personalised approach that learns our individual preferences. Imagine a world without local hard drives, and ask yourself why that might feel so foreign to you. It’s a natural next step - and perhaps one to come with the positive side effect that in future, going offline will really mean taking a break from all the digital content in our lives.