Cloud Computing - The Future???

The end of ‘Fashion-IT’?? – customers will only pay for value and not technology.

Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility (like the electricity grid) over a network (typically the Internet). IT is basically a concept of letting your ideas float in a server rather than on business apps, making it more faster, highly customizable and well upgradable. It provides data access, computation and storage without the need of physical location. All the applications run on a shared data center and also provides dynamically scalable and often virtualized resources. So you get to use the applications via internet, which can be accessed from a web browser, while the business software and data are stored on servers at a remote location
Usually, when you open a business, you need softwares, power, bandwith and such other things. You also need a team of trained IT experts to run and manage them. Upgrading, maintaining, testing the softwares becomes a painful task. Compare that to cloud computing which provides a new way to increase capacity or add capabilities on the fly without investing in new infrastructure, training new personnel, or licensing new software. It is fast to get started and also economical. It is flexible and follows pay for what you use. You can customize the packages you need. Thats the power of Cloud Computing; and its changing the way we think about softwares.

There are all kinds of apps running on cloud, consumer, business apps and even custom apps. It is more reliable and secure; as it doesnt have separate apps for each business thats using it. Its one app that everyone shares, but its highly flexible for every business to customize as per their needs. The new features and updates are automatically installed, so it provides easy upgrades and maintenance.
It has gained lots of popularity in the world. Basically the concept here is applications and storage are web based. So, you don't save file on hard drive and don't access them on computer; its all stored online and its gonna be there no matter what computer you are from. This increases portability and allows easy sharing across networks.

However there is a downside to cloud computing. You don't know where your data are stored, and how it might be used. Everything depends upon faith that your data will be kept safe and won't be used in a criminal way. Also there is a possibility that a service could crash or go out of business, leaving users with limited or no access to their data. It also doesn't allow the users to control the environment like they want. So you cannnot schedule your backups and use it like a personal computer. The other issue that might effect people is when the cloud computing server goes down. What happens if you can't access your file for a day, it might impact the business. We have seen Google Apps go down in countries. Also the cloud server can be in any country and each country have different rules and regulation about data security. Finally another question to be asked is can we migrate current business conviniently with all the datas and who will be the owner?

Thus, Cloud Computing is a neat concept of computing. It has lots of advantages, high storage on servers, easy upgradability and maintenance. Its easier to share and work on documents as it can be accessed from any computers, but there are some security and EULA issues to be considered while signing up for the service. It will certainly provide more effective way to run business, and focus more on services. So there is no reason to give up on Cloud Computing, we should promote it.

The cloud is for everyone. The cloud is a democracy. However beware of false cloud.