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Bits and Bytes October 9, 2009
By Gregory M. Peiguss
Keeping Your Head in the Clouds Well, more to the point,
keeping your PC in the cloud to be specific. Yet another rage in
the IT industry, Cloud Computing refers to a broad range of “services”
that are available across the internet. Some of those services may
include servers, applications (programs), and networks.
Ostensibly, you are accessing a resource across an internet connection.
So why is this type of computing starting to take hold? Well,
there are a couple of very significant factors that are enabling users
to operate in this type of environment. First, broadband access,
or internet access at very high speeds, has become much more prevalent
and the speeds keep increasing. Not so much as 10 years ago, it
was virtually unheard of if you had an internet circuit that exceeded
the speed of a dial-up modem. At 56kbps, you weren’t getting
anywhere very quickly, unless you worked for a corporation that had the
budget to afford a high capacity circuit. Nowadays, affordable,
fast internet connections are available to most home users via such
mediums as your telephone lines, cable television, or wireless. Second, the need for
cost cutting and economies of scale during this economic downturn are
forcing some companies or individuals to think “out of the box” with
respect to their IT budgets and expenditures. Companies and
individuals can “pay as you go” for a service that is required.
For example, say an organization wants to upgrade their existing
infrastructure, and we all know what drives hardware upgrades, right?
It’s software. So, you have to go out and buy the latest and
greatest server/PC/or laptop, purchase the software to go along with it,
and pay the IT guy to set it up for you. Well, in some
circumstances, that may be the case and depending on what you are doing
you can’t avoid it. However, there is an alternative. You
can just hop up in the cloud and take care of what you need to.
You can create documents, spreadsheets, presentations, or whatever you
need to do, virtually from any computer on the planet. Think of this as renting
a service, or utility. Why buy that expensive piece of hardware or
software when you only need it occasionally? You can just pay for
the time that you need it. Of course, there are some drawback and
situations where cloud computing might not be applicable, not yet at
least. If you are performing
some very intensive calculations or moving large amounts of data, this
might not be the solution for you. The more users you have
accessing this service, the more bandwidth you are going to need.
Some examples of this might be programs like CAD, or databases that can
have very large files that need to be moved around. That’s not to
say that you can’t operate in a hybrid environment of both in house
infrastructure and cloud assets. Secondly, if you operate in the
cloud, you do not possess your data. It’s somewhere else, so data
security will be an issue. You are relying on somebody else
to back it up and keep it safe from intruders. As well, what
happens if your internet connection goes down? If your resources
are somewhere else, productivity will quickly grind to a halt until the
medium is restored. As you can see there are
very distinct advantages and disadvantages of cloud computing.
There are several online companies that offer this type of service and
some are free to give it a spin. You can find these providers
online and some examples are: Amazon, Google, Microsoft and
Salesforce.com.
You can e-mail me at anytime at g@219.com
Gregory M. Peiguss
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