Day Two at Recon 2012, Property Capsule CEO, Alex Markson gave an in-depth crash course on cloud technology in the Social Media Pavilion.
Markson explained the paradigm shift from traditionally deployed servers to cloud computing, and how anyone can virtually create a massive data center in the cloud using services such as Amazon’s Elastic Web Services platform.
He explained how this new way of storing information has opened new avenues for deal-making through a rapid improvement in available technology, and how the iPad is the poster child for a new generation of cloud services.
Agents and Brokers can easily access information such as site plans on any device including the iPad by storing all of their information in generalized cloud based services such as Dropbox, Google Docs and of course our favorite tailor-made solution: Property Capsule.
The audience agreed that cloud based infrastructure is the way of the future, but had concerns about security.
One audience member asked specifically about Dropbox– if all your information exists in the cloud, who can access it? Where is the cloud? How is it encrytped?
The simple answer is services, such as Dropbox have a high level of encryption that is very similar to the military. On the other hand, users have to be aware of with whom they share their information and what level of access they have. Also, the beauty of accessing your information on any device anywhere is that you can retrieve your information even when the device is lost. Unfortunately that means that your information is left out there on that device. In this case, the user will have to log in and change passwords, so others can’t access their information.
Another valid concern is the stability of some cloud-based services, such as Dropbox. What if Dropbox goes out of business, where will my information go? How can I retrieve it?
The simple answer of course is to read the terms of agreement of whatever services you are using. What are the contingency plans, if such an event were to occur? If you still have concerns, it’s never too late to backup your information. A lot of the more reputable services allow users to download and store their information remotely. This is a feature that Facebook currently has for users who no longer want to use Facebook, but want to keep their photos and other data. Property Capsule has a similar feature for downloading a ZIP file of your content.
Click here to view the deck from the presentation and check back here for a full video.
