Cloud Computing: What is it?
Cloud computing is a technology that isn’t yet in the consciousness of the everyday consumer, whereas in the corporate world a lot of heads are beginning to pay attention. For those of you who looked confused at the worlds cloud computing, this is a brief introduction.
Cloud computing is the opposite of today’s computer technology. Every time Intel launches a better processor, we begin to feel that the old desktop in our houses needs replacing. We constantly play catch up to be up to date with the best gadgets and rarely ever feel satisfied. With cloud computing, we now have power of making computing time into a utility just like gas or electricity. Similar to how electricity is distributed from the generation station to your home, we now will have wireless computing capability that we can pay for as we use it.
The user will need a simple terminal that can access the internet. The terminal could be an internet capable phone or a regular PC. With the browser and minimal processing power at your local terminal, you can use supercomputers at the back end to do your processing. This does the opposite of what an iPhone does in today’s market. Instead of your phone having an expensive processor on it, we can use any phone that has an internet browser. Through the high end speeds available on broadband and 4G, we use high end processors that are stacked up by a service provider. In technical terms, this provides users a level of abstraction. Users no longer need to worry about if their operating system will be compatible with an application or a game. They just choose what they want to run, and the backend will do all the work. The results are sent to your device through an internet connection.
ABI’s research forecasts that the market in cloud computing will swell to $20 billion dollars by 2014. Companies like Google, Yahoo, Amazon and many others have been investing heavily in cloud computing. Consumers may not be aware, but Gmail is a service which is based on cloud computing. Google stores a central copy of all our data, and this makes it possible for Google Docs to work in real time. Small businesses have a big role to play in cloud computing as well. Though there is a heavy investment required to provide infrastructure for cloud computing, small companies can bypass this step. They can lease computing power from the bigger providers like Amazon. Amazon currently provides an Infrastructure-As-a-Service (IAaS) package: companies can buy required computing time and memory needs on the go. Companies can scale up or scale down their resources dynamically and this can be very efficient in the process. There will be no dead costs associated with idle hardware at any point.
There are a few products available in the markets that are derived from Cloud Computing. Apple’s MobileMe is an example. It allows users to sync data on their PC to their cell phone in real time. They do charge $99 a year for the service and the package is device dependant. The next step in the pipeline is said to be a tie up between Google and Apple. Apple plans to launch a mobile tablet which will be able to use Google’s cloud computing hardware. Since the tablet does not require high end hardware it would be much cheaper than the phones and computers available today. Consumers who previously couldn’t afford to buy an iPhone or a BlackBerry can now exploit all the tools that are offered by cloud computing.
There is one crucial factor however that Cloud computing depends on: Security. User data will be stored remotely in a cloud computing environment. People would be initially uncomfortable with the idea that their data would float in the unknowns of cyberspace. Worries of a hacker gaining access to their confidential documents or their data being accidentally deleted will always be on the user’s mind. If companies can make this technology as transparent as possible and assure the consumer total satisfaction that their data is secure, it stands a good chance to be the next big change our society could see in the near future.