Vodafone sees silver lining in cloud computing

Vodafone, the world’s biggest carrier by revenues, picked a bad week to launch its cloud-based services offering. On Tuesday the firm announced a strategic partnership with Decho to launch a range of cloud computing services starting with Vodafone PC Backup.

Decho, a subsidiary of storage firm EMC, specialises in online content backup and the first Vodafone branded service will enable customers to securely back up work-related or personal digital content from their computer to a remotely hosted site.

Once a customer has backed-up their digital content they will always be able to access it, even if their primary device is lost, stolen or otherwise unavailable. Using a web-based interface, Vodafone customers will also be able to transfer their content to other devices.

Vodafone is the latest telecoms player to jump on the cloud computing bandwagon already occupied by O2 (Bluebook), Apple (MobileMe), Nokia (Ovi), and Palm (webOS) among others. But there’s not been much of a silver lining in the cloud this week, with dark skies above T-Mobile and BT.

Earlier this week, T-Mobile USA and the Sidekick data services provider, Danger, a subsidiary of Microsoft, were forced to issue a grovelling apology, after a glitch wiped out user data stored in the cloud.

While in the UK, BT came under fire after users of its Digital Vault backup service found themselves unable to access their content. Fortunately however, the content itself seems to be safe, it’s just that users can’t get to it. BT said it is working on the problem.