Cochrane, who has been watching the IT industry for more than four decades, argues that the diversity of devices that users will start accessing their cloud resources with in the short-to-medium term future wild make life more difficult for hackers.
"Not only will we have many more devices with more operating systems and applications, there will be at least two distinctly different cloud modes", he says in his latest security posting.
"Google sees the cloud as the great computer in the sky - and the centre of your life with compute power apps and information remotely located on servers. Your terminal devices will be much reduced in power and capability, but available at a much lower price and with endless battery life. This is a vision that bravely assumes broadband, lots of broadband, is available everywhere", he adds.
Cochrane goes on to report that Apple sees your device as the centre of your life with lots of computing power and capability.
Here, he explains, the cloud is an orchestrator of connectivity information and resources - the gateway of your life.
"An online partner and support for your computing and communication needs. This is a vision that pragmatically assumes that broadband provision will limp into the future and will not be available everywhere", he explained.
So who is going to be right, he asks in a rhetorical question.
"My travel experiences say Apple in the first instance but Google ultimately. But don't ask me to put a date on ultimately", he replies.
Today, says the former BT CTO, we mostly have all our IT eggs in one static and very dumb internet basket, which exposes networks, devices and people to security, reliability and resilience. But tomorrow, he adds, everyone's eggs will all be different by device, application set and cloud type.
Despite this positive outlook on the cloud, Cochrane advises that we still need to start asking a new set of questions:
How will the dark side respond?
How will they get on the inside?
How will they attack?
"Even more importantly, how can we make it even more difficult for them? And can we marshal our distributed computing and people power to detect, defend and repel them?" he says.
"I reckon we can. But it has to be a conscious move on our part, and I suspect Apple and Google will be in the vanguard of this change. Best of all, they will be supported by a geek - and not-so-geek - army more than the equal of the dark side", he adds.