Is the cloud-driven mobile home office a place of faith, or expectations.

Is the cloud-driven mobile home office a place of faith, or expectations?

Call it a leap of faith.

Every time my family travels on Home Office Highway, I load up a flash drive with documents, files and notes for stories and columns in progress.

This year, except for a flash-drive built into a card reader for my camera, I brought no portable drive.

All my documents, files and notes were / are stored in the Cloud. Notes for my columns, interviews for pending stories, even all the notes related to our destinations, RV parks and other trip details were stored either to Google Notes, Gmail or Google Docs.

About a month ago, I subscribed to Carbonite. This online data back-up and retrieval service not only is good for data security. Remote access makes all my documents and files accessible for any Internet-connected computer anywhere. I can fetch documents, images, videos – the lot.

Is this a leap of faith? Road warriors and teleworkers work from The Cloud without a second thought or moment’s hesitation. Their office is the hotel room or executive suite or home office or driver’s seat. Their server is The Cloud. No cause for pause.

Get used to it, peeps. This type of faith is just a harbinger of experiences to come. Soon, in the not-too-distant future, everything we need to work (save the Internet connected PC itself) will be hosted in the Cloud. Our applications (Office, Open Office, art and design applications) and the data we create with them will be hosted on servers Out There. That’s already the case with so many of the social networking tools we use:Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, MySpace, YouTube – they’re all out there, just waiting for our user ID and password.

Increasingly, our data’s out there, too. If you blog, most blog entries are written and permanently stored exclusively on the blog engine.

All of these documents, data and applications are Out There and accessible via the Internet. On this year’s Home Office Highway, we moved further into The Cloud. But the reality was, we rarely strayed from civilization. Take a trip miles from the nearest cell antenna or deep into a canyon or dense woods, those places where Internet signals weaken and service grows spotty, and you could be lost – adrift and removed from the precious Cloud.

This this year was no true leap of faith. I had faith that all my stuff would be nearby — as the Cloud would be, too. Take that trip farther along roads less traveled, where clouds disperse and work yieldsto release, and I may find that a flash drive stuffed with docs would be a welcome addition.

Or one whose absence would allow me to enjoy the environs that much more.