Cloud Computing, The Next Millstone
In our daily life, we may hear that someone has rented a house, room, or something similar, and that is completely normal to hear. But, what would come to your mind if someone says, “I have rented a computer.” It may sound little bit awkward first, but it gets more interesting if you know that you have actually rented a computer right now when you read this without you noticing that! You may think that I am exaggerating, but when you finish reading this article, you will indeed believe that. Day to day, we may glimpse the word “cloud” in technology. Clouds are in the sky! How is that related to technology?
To simply state, cloud or cloud computing is a platform that remotely deliver computing services, such as storage, databases, networking to the customers. By remotely, we simply mean through Internet. Imagine you want to start a merchandise company when you buy and sell various products. Indeed, in your company, you need some computational infrastructure. For example, you want to have a database that keeps track of your products, and calculates you expense and profit. Suddenly, a concern pops up in your head. You, as a startup, do not have enough resources to tackle this concern. Also, you believe that you cannot survive without this. I mean, think about your business without database! How you are going to calculate these complex expense and profit calculations. Forget about it! Without this, your business goes bankrupt, period. So, you eagerly want to solve this problem, so thinking about cloud computing is the best alternative to survive. One of the main aspects of cloud computing is to shuffle the main focus of business to the business shot-term and long-term goals, and leaving IT infrastructure aside. Now, you can subscribe to database and analytics through Internet that does all the calculations with data analysis for your business without you concerning about details of these complex operations. You may be curious, which you should be, about how this is possible? What is happening behind the curtains? Well, there are companies which establish massive computing platforms, called “clouds”, and embed these computers with specialized operating systems and software. These software conduct very specific actions that matches the user’s requirements, and are connected to the Internet. Users can remotely access these computers. To clarify further, think about you merchandise company, you subscribe to these computers, normally through their website, and you send your monthly cost and benefit data to these computers. Theses “clouds” have a very efficient business software on them. They use their massive computing power, and send you back the result of your data with storing your data in a permanent storage. The result contains all the requirements that you want to know about the current state of your business. You simply “rent out” computing power from your cloud service provider.
Theses “computing clouds” have many effective advantages in the term of business, but three of them are the most prominent. Firstly, it reduces cost. As you notice, in the merchandise example, your company does not need to buy hardware, and configure them in your office. You leave all these headaches to your cloud provider, and they take care of this for you. Also, cloud’s charging method is “pay as you go,” which means they charge you with your usage. Less you use, less they charge you, and the vice versa, which can effectively reduce cost within your company. Secondly, the cloud’s performance is phenomenal. Because cloud providers specialize in their scope, they know the business trends, and they provide computational power that matches the business needs. The last benefit is the reliability. The clouds conduct continuous backup for data, which means your data is very safe, and you do not need to scare of losing data. As data is defined as asset in your company, you should be aware of the value of data for your business decisions. Also, they provide data mirroring. Data mirroring means you can use your data on different platform simultaneously because your data is on a remote location.
Far from a business perspective, clouds are everywhere on the Internet. If you have an account on a social network, you are using a cloud. The cloud stores all of your posts, pictures, videos, etc. Wait a minute! Do you have an email account? If your answer is yes, congratulations, you have rented someone else’s computer. Your email provider is operating on a cloud, which stores and manages all of you emails, attachments, etc. that you generate. On the other side, a lot of the services are stepping toward becoming clouds in the future. Therefore, we can easily say that cloud is the next revolution of technology in our era.
To sum up, clouds are the next millstone that revolutionize the technology infrastructure. Today, we may not be able to access all types of data through the Internet, but in a very close future local computational power, hard drives, and many other computational processes would be obsolete because we do not want need them locally, rather we access them through the Internet.
