What is ........ Cloud Computing?

What is it?

Cloud computing is a IT service that offers to provide computing power and storage away from your own company / organisation.

Staff connect to the remote service via a fast internet connection or a dedicated leased line. Of course, individuals can also rent the same service.

For example, Amazon has a vast IT infrastructure built to deal with its own business. But they realised that they had a lot of idle computing power and storage - so why not rent it out to other companies / people? So that is what they did and is called the 'S3' service.

Another huge company - Google - also has lots of spare capacity in its data centres around the world. So they too are offering companies the ability to rent that resource.

Many other providers are entering the arena with competitive products.

The unique selling point is straightforward for the customer

1. They do not need to invest in their own IT hardware \ staff to such an extent.
2. Critical company data is safe in dedicated data centres, with multiple backups around the world.
3. If the company expands or there is a surge in customer demand, they simply rent more computing power and storage.

Virtual computer.

A very handy feature is the 'virtual computer'. A normal computer is only useful if it is loaded with an operating system and the software application you want to use. This takes a lot of time and effort to set up and it takes even longer if something goes wrong so you have to re-install everything again.

With a virtual computer, the entire software setup is stored as an 'image' - a binary file that is an exact copy of the 'real' computer. This image is then loaded onto powerful hardware in the cloud and runs as if it were a normal machine - this is called an 'instance'.

You can open and shut as many instances as you wish to pay for. An example of this kind of service is the Amazon EC2 service.

Downsides?

Of course, all this costs money. You would have to work out whether it is cheaper to use local machines or to hire virtual machines in the cloud.

You would have to consider whether it is better to have IT expertise within your company or to 'outsource' it to a cloud service.

If you have huge data sets to handle then the issue of downloading / uploading can also be a problem.

The future?

Cloud computing will continue to expand its services. One possibility is that the standard 'office' type applications : word processing, spreadsheet etc are not loaded on a local computer but instead the person is connected to a cloud version. The risk of course, is if the internet link breaks of some other problem occurs and no-one in your company can do their work. But the benefits of virtual office software may outweigh the risks. We shall see.