A lot of people are buzzing about “the cloud” and “cloud computing” these days. If you feel as though you’re out of the loop, don’t despair. Although the cloud can be a highly technical and complicated subject, it’s easy to understand the basics – enough to keep you informed and get your company up and running.
The term “cloud computing” has been used to mean utility computing, grid computing, autonomic computing, peer-to-peer computing, remote processing, software as a service (SaaS), and Internet-based applications. No wonder people are confused!
So what is the cloud? At its most basic, the cloud is simply a metaphor for the Internet. Cloud computing is a way for an individual user, or a company, to access the supercomputing power that was once only available to the military-industrial complex and other very large users. The purpose of cloud computing is to apply traditional supercomputing power to everyday business applications; tens of trillions of computations per second can be achieved through cloud computing, as opposed to only a few billion computations per second that are possible with even an extremely powerful desktop computer.
You have probably already experienced some consumer cloud applications – think Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Gmail, Yahoo!, and Flickr. BitTorrent, a peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol, and Skype, a peer-to-peer application which enables telephone calls over the Internet, are also great examples of cloud computing.
Enterprise cloud computing (or cloud computing for businesses) is an on-demand computing infrastructure, which networks large groups of servers in order to provide low-cost, high-capacity processes to each user without requiring that the user maintain hardware, software or the complex and expensive infrastructure that is necessary to support them.
Three distinct characteristics differentiate a cloud-computing platform from traditional hosting. First, cloud computing is sold by a third-party vendor, either by subscription service or on a utility basis. In other words, you purchase usage of the network, much in the same way you would purchase delivery of a magazine or newspaper over a period of time, or the ability to tap into public utilities such as electricity. Either way, cloud computing is an on-demand system, as opposed to the capital expenditure typically associated with software-based systems, in which an initial investment as well as continuing costs for upkeep and upgrades are both required. This makes cloud computing ideal for users whose processing need is uncertain or variable, such as start-ups or seasonal businesses.
Cloud computing is elastic and can be provisioned to scale up or down, depending on the user’s needs. A company is not locked into any particular level of usage, but can have as much or as little of a service as they want at any given time.
Lastly, the service is fully managed by a third-party provider, which eliminates the need for a company to purchase, install, and maintain expensive software, hardware, servers, storage, bandwidth and other resources – including the information technology professionals who are required to deploy the software-based applications. With cloud computing, the consumer needs nothing but a web browser and Internet access. The web browser can be a traditional desktop or laptop PC, a Netbook, or a mobile device such as a PDA, BlackBerry or iPhone.
Another advantage to enterprise cloud computing is that the business applications it provides are customizable; each end-user can tweak his or her interface to personal preference, much as one would change the settings on a website that one visits often. Developers and IT professionals have the ability to dig deeper and further customize the apps, and apps can be built to a company’s specifications, but the ease-of-use and mobility of cloud-based apps are two of their most popular attributes.
