The thing about writing on technology is that you end up taking so much ghastly jargon for granted. So much so, that when I get notes about ‘cloud computing’ I don’t bat the proverbial eyelid any more.

Cloud computing actually appears quite a good idea. In essence, rather than log on to your own internal system that you have to manage, you log on to data that’s out there somewhere – encrypted within an inch of its life, by all means, but basically you’re using someone else’s computer. Unlike what we used to call application service provision and now call hosted services, your system could be distributed around a number of different computers. It won’t matter when you look at it. People like Netsuite are very strong in this area, providing online applications. Even Google is in on the act with its Google Apps scheme, mentioned in a previous blog.

What’s going to be interesting for businesses of all sizes is just how well the customer reacts to this sort of innovation. There are loads of advantages – you can log on to your data from anywhere (so if you decide to work from home one day but don’t have that particular document with you, it shouldn’t be a problem) and of course if you can be sharing space with more than one company on a computer somewhere, then there are green implications too.

What’s not in place yet is trust from the user community. What? You want us to hand all our customer data over to a computer and you can’t even tell us who owns it? Our confidential accounts and you want us to ‘donate’ them to a bunch of strangers we don’t even know?

You can see the objections. My guess is that there’ll be issues around this for some time yet. I’d be very interested to hear from any accountants who’ve already started working with cloud computing just yet.