The cloud is now – and the future
Cloud storage - keeping your data 'in the sky' may not be a new idea, but it's becoming a core part of many organisations' IT strategies.
06 October 2011
Let's face it, ever since computers arrived, they brought with them some challenges. A key one of these is that organisations need infrastructure (hardware and software) to use it. Both of these cost money - and organisations today need to be lean.
All of those servers humming away cost money to buy, configure, manage, run and power. They're needy.
Benefit from economies of scale
The idea behind cloud computing is simple - if you move all of that infrastructure somewhere else, somewhere with significantly superior economies of scale, somewhere that's managed all day, every day, then there's money to be saved without any sacrifice of quality of service.
In some cases, the cloud will be used simply for storage - but in most, a lot of the processing power will take place there, with the data accessed either via a fairly dumb application or a Web-based interface.
A few things have held up the drive towards cloud computing though. It requires an always-on access to the Internet. By definition, if you can't reach the cloud, you can't compute. Plus, it feels somehow less secure to store information thousands of miles away.
Software as a service
Let's look at a fairly mainstream example of cloud computing - Google Apps. This comes with 99.9% uptime, guaranteed. Data is automatically replicated across multiple data centres, worldwide, to ensure it's safe. It provides a reasonable alternative to Microsoft Office and Exchange Server (now including multi-person editing of Office files via Cloud Connect), yet it costs £33 per user, per year, all-in. It has 40 million active users, with 4 million customers. Everything is administered over the Web. Everything is managed for you - maintenance, upgrades and backups. Everything can be accessed from anywhere, using nearly every browser (though it works better with Chrome).
The virtual aspect
This is only one example of cloud computing - and it's part of an overall approach which also includes virtualisation: why have a 'real' server when a virtual one can be set up in minutes, costs less (because it's one of several running on one piece of kit) and can be replaced faster (sometimes within milliseconds) should something go wrong?
Combine the ideas of cloud computing with virtual servers and organisations now have a greater number of cheaper, more robust options for managing their infrastructure - whether they choose to 'opt out' and use a fully managed software-as-a-service solution such as Google Apps, or move their current infrastructure to a cloud system to reduce costs and maintenance. Or both.
It's an idea which may have been uncomfortable at first (mainly because "I can't touch the server"), but is now part of many organisations' core thinking.
And some organisations are already taking the idea of the cloud further. Take iCloud. Although it's a consumer-based product, the idea is sound - the user saves something on one device, that device replicates it to iCloud, which replicates it to your other devices. This is a different approach from Google's "just store it in the cloud" - giving perhaps the best of both worlds. It currently only works with a limited number of applications - but it's not hard to conceive of a future where the local file system is, at an OS level, rather than at an application level, entirely optional - or even redundant.
When people started talking about cloud computing, perhaps it looked like another fad. Combined with virtualisation, it's clearly not - it's the way smart companies are computing now, and in the future.
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