Cloud Computing Part 1 : Are we doing it already?
Join us as we discuss the evolution of the cloud and try to understand how the clouds might transcend horizons and come offshore.
Have you ever watched a video online or shared snaps of your loved ones by using one of the many photo hosting services on the web? Do you read news online or watch your favourite Television shows on the internet?
If your answer to any of the above is ‘YES’, then you are more or less a part of the cloud fraternity. The term ‘Cloud Computing’ has gained immense popularity in the recent times and is being touted as the way forward in IT services. So what is Cloud Computing? All the service examples given above suggest that any service we subscribe to over the internet is part of Cloud Computing. In a more refined way, Cloud Computing encompasses any subscription based or pay per use service, that we avail real time over the internet. But wait, Cloud computing is not only this but much more.
In fact the term “Cloud” is derived from the way we represent internet in network diagrams in the form of cloud. While service or computation over a network has been present for ages, formal cloud service offering have come to the fore only in the last decade or so. There were many free services offered in the internet like storage in a limited way. Many niche players ‘mushroomed’, offering photo storage and sharing or media storage, and then there were bulk storage service providers who charged for their service. News sites and online journals had subscription based services. The term cloud computing was rarely used for such services. While all these can be considered as service over the network, these were mostly targeted at individuals or small businesses. The real push towards commercial use of cloud computing took advent after the dot com bubble burst, but even then most of the commercial software services provided over the network were referred to as Software as a Service. Marc Benioff launched Salesforce.com in 1999-2000. Today, it has emerged as a front-runner in the SaaS space.
Cloud computing really took off in the past couple of years, thanks to the trend where not just software, but IT services were offered over the internet by providers. Amazon attained such efficiency by revamping its data center, which it is now offering as a utility computing service to its clients. Small businesses and start ups that cannot afford to buy huge storage spaces or maintain them make use of this Simple Storage Service offered by Amazon. Many providers have entered the market with many such Cloud offerings.
What Cloud computing offers is all the functionality required to run an IT organization, but without having to face the overhead of running the IT infrastructure in-house. This is what is drawing enterprises towards cloud computing. Consider this, an enterprise can be using cutting-edge technologies but there is no need to buy any infrastructure upfront, no need to license software, no upgrades are required for either the software or the hardware and no training needs. The provider manages the service and the user, be it individuals, small, medium or large businesses, pays based on how much computing is used.
Cloud computing is truly the top buzz word for the current year. A huge number of seminars, webinars and forums have been planned for the rest of the year and one hears of a new offering being launched almost on a daily basis. Needless to say, there are many players investing huge amount in cloud computing research. The cloud is becoming real with giants in the IT software, hardware and services space moving in to capture a piece of the pie. IBM,Microsoft,Dell
My friend Pradeep and I have developed an avid interest for the ‘cloud’. We have been tracking this topic for some time now and have seen it mushroom into a formidable IT paradigm. We feel it will not be long before the cloud transcends horizons and moves offshore. How would the cloud computing space evolve? What role would the Indian IT majors and India based captive units of global IT services giants play? How long would it take for the cloud to become a mainstream paradigm in the CRM world?
We hope to provide answers to these questions through this blog. Another objective is to try and provide a ‘primer’ on the topic in terms of its definition, evolution, market trends, characteristics, problem areas that will need to be addressed, enterprise adoption of the cloud etc. so as to benefit the larger community.
Join us as we discuss the evolution of the cloud and try to understand how the clouds might transcend horizons and come offshore.
Comments
1. Don't you think that cloud computing is relevant to companies that are looking at SaaS?
2. Can you delink the data from the app? How can you ensure security?
3. Isn't cloud computing similar to the way we used to function (at least conceptually) in the mainframe world where everything was a terminal? How is it different ?
Posted by: Pradeep | March 18, 2009 9:47 PM
I am still confused on what Cloud Computing is. Does it mean that we can access servers' processing power in an aggregated way?
Posted by: Toxic | April 1, 2009 10:06 PM
I have a similar doubt to what Pradeep has. How is Cloud different from mainframes?
We surely are using up the servers' processing power.
I mean this is like history being repeated going back to the good (read complicated) old days of mainframes. But this structure does have great benefits.
For example, how does one pirate a Cloud application. This is great for IP protection. But security is the major concern. I mean if only one person hacks into the Cloud, he/she has all the access to the data of many customers which could be quite sensitive.
Why not give each customer a key generation tool or an applet that resides on the desktop (client) which generates a random key. The logic of this runs on the server too and it tries to match this key with the one generated on the desktop.
I mean hackers can hack your login but when they want to touch your data the key matching process begins. Of course this is not the ultimate solution, again it's just a line of thought.
As Pradeep said delinking the data from app is a good idea. But still when we talk about large chunks of data, it would be nice if we could use the disk space on the cloud server.
This is surely an amazing development. Microsoft never misses such a tasty pie. Azure is right on track at the right time.
Posted by: Krishnakumar | April 8, 2009 7:56 AM
I'm totally confused with SaaS and Cloud Computing...
Posted by: Nitin Sawant | April 13, 2009 3:47 PM