hat is “The Cloud”?
If you have never read a science-fiction book or watched a movie, this will be something totally new for you. For the other part of humanity, this is the “Mother Computer” idea in reality, simply with an added little twist. It doesn’t work as you expect it. As we all know, there is this terminal based world where there is a gigantic Mother Computer and we are all connected to it through terminals and IT rules our world. Well, it’s something like this but not exactly. Because the huge difference is in the approach taken by different companies at the moment, there are no terminals but we have “The Cloud” which is nothing more than an elastic hardware approach which allows you to extend the same Operation System, Database and File System to many computers basically to virtualize them. We are still far away from the real “Mother Computer”.
The big bubble
This is the power of marketing and how to sell some old ideas for brand new ones. As we told you earlier, this is the Mother Computer idea under a new name. Many companies are trying to justify this software as a service model implementation but for the moment the services developed for this type of infrastructure are hard to build and are not as accessible as they want you to believe.
Why it’s so important
The importance of this platform is its cost effectiveness. Imagine you want to deliver a web site experience to millions of users: you can create your own cluster for that or create this virtualized Cloud infrastructure in which you can dynamically assign resources for all your users based on their usage.
Everything is about the price
Some of the used models are so price effective that ICPs cut the price of hardware and software up to 80%. This is the reason most of the banks and other huge organizations like Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and etc. create their own hive of services, so everybody can use them.
How it’s connected to the hosting?
Well, imagine now that your user wants you to increase their memory, disk space and CPUs: this means that if you do not have a virtualized infrastructure like “The Cloud”, you have to upgrade the hardware on your machine which in turn is quite expensive. Here the Cloud shows its power: in it you can give the user what they want only in a couple of seconds, without ever touching the hardware.
The good and the bad sides of “The Cloud”
The good side of this approach is the robust infrastructure and the reliability of storage.
The bad side is that it’s on the web, it’s not on your machine and this in turn is a security risk. Even with the best security in hands, you are giving your information to servers somewhere on the grid. And for the moment the services developed are really not as reliable as we wish to keep the users’ files in a super secure environment. We are still waiting for standards which will cover the sensitive user information from the legal point of view.
