The simple answer to this question is: When everyone has fiber-like Internet speeds.
All the talk about Cloud technology is great, and things are definitely headed in that direction. But only much faster Internet speeds will make saving data in the Cloud—and retrieving it—a practical, hassle-free, and widely popular solution.
Most businesses are currently stuck in a range of 1.5 MB to 20 MB for their Internet speed. A few have a fiber connection that’s much faster, but most small business use traditional Internet providers and aren’t willing to pay the higher prices for a fiber connection.
For tasks like surfing the Internet or downloading a small file here and there, running at those speeds isn’t a problem. But if you compare them to the speed of a typical local-area network (LAN), the comparison gets ugly. LAN speeds are a minimum of 100 MB and a maximum of 1000MB (or 1 GB).
You might wonder: Why am I mentioning this?
Well, if you’re used to getting data and documents from your local server at the speed of 1GB, and the connection speed drops to 1.5MB or 20MB, you’ll definitely notice the difference. And it won’t feel good. A document that once opened almost instantaneously will take 10 or 20 seconds to open. You’ll have to learn patience. For big presentations, you’ll have enough time to get up and pour yourself a cup of coffee while waiting for the download.
There are some workarounds to this speed issue. You could have your desktop in the Cloud, for example, or you could have some version of the document saved locally, then sync it up with the Cloud as needed. But wouldn’t it be better and more convenient if Internet speeds were faster?