When Mick Jagger and Keith Richards wrote the words to “Get off of my Cloud” computers were far from being a part of everyday life. The computers of the day were huge monstrosities that belonged to big companies.
In those days, computers were large centralized mainframes. Users sat at dumb terminals that could work only when the mainframe was running.
The personal computer revolution happened during the 1980’s. Suddenly, everyone had a great deal of flexibility. They could add, change and remove files on their own PC. They could install their own programs.
At first the Internet had great novelty value. Some were adding information and libraries. Others tried to make money. But the Internet has finally come of age. We no longer need fancy programs on our personal computers or notebooks. We can store all our documents on the Internet. This is what has become known as the cloud. The programs that we need live on the cloud. With cloud computing, the notebook need not be anything more than a dumb terminal …
The cloud is a metaphor for the Internet. Its use in system diagrams became common to show the Internet as being somewhere else, out there. What has happened is that companies that specialize in providing Internet hosting are now able to offer vast capacity at very manageable cost.
The main types of cloud computing are Infrastructure-as-a-service providing space, database maintenance and backups; Platform-as-a-service where the systems are hosted; and Software-as-a-service, providing software for the enterprise.
The cloud may be public (available to all) or private. The service is usually charged by time, usage and space requirements.
The advantages of cloud computing are similar in some ways to old-fashioned mainframe computers. All that is required is a basic machine with Internet access. The cloud computing service does the rest.
There are all sorts of advantages to cloud computing. A small company does not require an IT department. Daily backups and data recovery provided by the hosting service mean that the data is always secure.
The systems and data can be accessed from anywhere at anytime by anyone that has access.
The cost advantages of cloud computing are huge. Companies that provide the hosting are able to make use of economies of scale. They provide powerful servers and vast quantities of storage. Using a hosting service for the company’s Web site was probably the earliest form of cloud computing. Next came web mail. Google expanded the concept, offering Google Docs - a facility to create, compose, edit and store a variety of documents on the Web. Google Mail allows you to store tens of thousands of mails. This is cloud computing, but most of us do not know it.
Taken to its logical conclusion, we can do all our computing on the web. Super fast machines with vast reserves of disk space are no longer required. All of that is taken care of on the cloud.
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