Cloud computing, placing data, services even software out there somewhere on the Internet, to be accessed and downloaded on demand from anywhere, is the current trend in information technology and has found a place in GI systems with the advent of ESRI's cloud based mapping service Arcgis.com.
While the ability of the latest iteration of ArcGIS server to work from within virtual devices in the cloud is nice, it is beyond most of our needs. But there are numerous cloud based services that we can all use, for free, largely to store, access and share data.
Dropbox provides 2.5GB of free, shareable on-line storage that can be synchronized across multiple platforms and devices (clients for Windows, Linux, OSX, iOS and Android are available). Windows SkyDrive provides a whopping 25GB of free cloud-based storage, 5GB of which can be synchronized between devices, with clients for Windows 7, Vista and MacOSX. If you are a dedicated Mac user Apple's new iCloud (see what they did there) provides 5GB of free synchronized storage that will keep all of your iOS and OSX devices in harmony and has a Windows client to boot. All of these offer excellent solutions for storing and sharing course project data and can be accessed from within the University on networked machines, so your personal data is always available and can be shared among a workgroup, unlike your University provided personal storage space.
Finally, if you want to go the whole hog, eyeOS offers free cloud-based virtual desktops, providing you access to your own virtual machine from anywhere you can get on-line with a web browser.
