A Basic Introduction To Cloud Computing



Posted: Thursday, July 09, 2009

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Cloud computing in its simplest form is a way to store data. The cloud is basically the internet, so it's internet computing, the exact definition will vary slightly depending on whether you're a consumer or a business

If you're a business, several of the big names on the internet like Amazon, IBM, Google etc all have cloud computing services. Instead of having to rent hardware and software and manage infrastructure to host a website, cloud computing lets you can deploy it on another existing infrastructure (i.e. Google or Amazon etc). The other advantage is because you're not hiring physical hardware you can scale up and down as you need so if your load suddenly goes up you're only paying for what you're using right now, if the load suddenly goes down again you haven't got a whole host of machines sitting idle.

From a consumer point of view, it's really the idea that you can keep your information in a cloud or on the Internet so you don't have to keep it on your computer. The beauty of this is if your computer breaks it's all stored elsewhere so all you need to do is get a new computer, plug it into the internet and everything you had there is still there. For example, some applications (like Google Docs), allows you to create documents online, you can type up a report or maybe use a spread sheet, and if your computer explodes it doesn't matter, because the next time you get on the internet that document will still be there it was stored on that applications servers. Another great advantage of cloud computing is that you can share these documents with other people, and you can invite them to collaborate on it and you can actually both edit it in real time then once that's done, you can easily publish it as a web page and make it available to the rest of your organisation or the wider world.

So why is cloud computing so important? For small businesses especially, one of the biggest challenges can be backing up your data and making sure everything is secure, and making sure your not going to loose everything when replicating. One of the big advantages to cloud computing is that you're putting that onus on someone else, by deploying your data on an online storage engine, you're actually relying on those guys to look after your information and given that the bigger infrastructures are world class and your small business may not be able to normally afford that level of hardware and network infrastructure so you're actually getting a really good deal. If you think about having a web server, you wouldn't have your website hosted on your computer on your desk at work so why should you have your documents there? It's good for people to be able to access this information at any time. Another more important thing is that it allows collaboration, in a way that running information on your computer doesn't, by pushing stuff into the cloud you can have multiple people collaborating in real time and this is already happening with things like Google Docs and spread sheets, you can have tens of users logged in at the same time editing the same document.

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