Systems today have evolved from huge bulky awkward looking structures to the sleek and sexy Apple Mac Book Air which is just few centimeters thick at maximum. Blue Ray Disks offer storage spaces from about 1 GB to thousand GB on a disc. And still you were cribbing abour your storage space, then relax! Now you don’t have to worry about the storage capacity of your computer, courtesy Cloud computing. What! Cloud computing? Why it will have a major impact on the storage peripherals of today? Will it affect the software industry as well? Plenty of questions must be hovering around your head just for cloud computing.The condition is akin to the situation when you enter into a restaurant and look at the menu card containing the list of dishes with fancy names. You start wondering what it is, will it satisfy your hunger, how will it taste, so on and so forth.
Companies like Amazon, Microsoft, Google, IBM and HP have already started work in this regard. Amazon with its Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, popularly called Amazon EC2 and Simple Storage Service or abbreviated as S3, has paved the way for others like Google and Microsoft to improve upon the existing structures and allay the fears and apprehensions vis-à-vis Cloud Computing.
Cloud Computing
The term really took me by surprise when I heard it for the first time and I really had no hint. But it was quite simple. According to Gartner cloud computing is “a style of computing where massively scalable IT-related capabilities are provided ‘as a service’ across the Internet to multiple external customers.” The idea of cloud computing was conceived by Oracle's Larry Ellison. He started the New Internet Computer (NIC) Company in 2000 to lead the industry forward to that goal. By using internet the PC of a user can be linked to a Super Computer which would host all the programs and files. However the concept was ahead of time and the company folded in 2003. [Source: PC World].
Cloud computing is simply using and storing data from and on a remote server with the help of a software interface. If it’s still difficult to understand, let’s take the example of emails. All our mails are stored on a remote server which can be accessed using a software interface like web browser (Firefox Mozilla, IE, Safari etc). However, emails can not be said to be something like cloud computing. Read More
Cloud computing thus provides the alternative for organizations which have limited work space and not adequate financial resources to upgrade their system and software without much shelling out much money. In case of cloud computing remote machines will run everything from emails to word processing to complex data analysis. These machines will then be owned by companies which will levy charges on the basis of time consumed and resources utilized.
Networking and Structure
Cloud Computing