Monday 9 November 2009

Cloud Computing. An end to our traditional Client/servers or Operating Systems?

Hello everyone and welcome to my blog. Today I'll be talking about cloud computing and how this might affect the way we work.


Firstly, what's cloud computing someone might ask?.........hmmmm..??!!. I must say at this juncture that cloud computing is a relatively new Phenomenon in the IT industry. However it could be defined simply as a style of virtual computing in which its resources are hosted in the cloud (or over the internet).

This is in effect slightly different to how we use our internet today. Many of us log on to the web to do a bit of browsing here and there and download stuffs probably, but for the most part, there is a huge dependency on our hardwares(PCs) and softwares (windows, Applications, etc) to run our business, or do our job

Now the idea around cloud computing is to free up your IT capital, reduce redundancies and enable you concentrate on your core business, whilst driving down cost considerably. This is achieved by providing these services on the cloud, by some specialised service providers of such.

And do you think IT cost is not a lot?...Think about software ugrades, patches, hardware upgrades, software licencing, server capacites, backup, labour costs, complex systems etc.. the list is endless. Many of us are aware that for most businesses, IT is core. This is because when the IT department sneezes the entire organisation catches cold. Mind you, am not tryng to de-emphasise IT in any form here. I have been an IT professional since 1992 and have worked with a lot of multinational organisations, and I know for a fact that in the unlikely event that our servers go down, nobody works.! People take cigarrette breaks..... What a dependency!!!. What service providers do is take on the hosting of these services on the cloud, including hosting your data, so you have absolute peace of mind and considerable cost savings

Imagine the nightmare of loosing your laptop. ..used to be a 'joke', but with cloud hosting, you need not worry about your data or applications, because nothing will be hosted locally. This could make a difference to someone life.

I must say however that cloud computing is still evolving and really, we're not there yet.

Some known players in this arena are Google, Amazon, salesforce, Netsuite. Netsuite provides Software As A Service (SaaS) for business softwares, Google (SaaS: GoogleAps), Salesforce (SaaS: CRM) Amazon (AWS), Microsoft, IBM, etc. Some players also provide Infrastructure As A Service (IaaS) and Platform as a service (PaaS)

What do you think of cloud computing?

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