Moving to the Cloud?

When I started thinking about cloud computing, I asked myself some questions:

• Is cloud something new?
• Do we know what cloud is?
• Is cloud just the sum of all the services available on the Internet?
• Are we really moving towards something new (the cloud) or away from something current/legacy (the local data centre)?

It could be thought that cloud is how computing all started, with a series of private clouds (then called mainframes) run by a number of companies and accessible by a relatively wide user base.

Browsing the Internet by its own nature is a cloud based activity and searching on the cloud couldn’t feasibly be anything else that a cloud service due to the scale of information. The adhoc design of the Internet also lead on to other cloud services helping everyone keep track of their favorite places (XMarks, Delicious, etc.)

Storage has now become common cloud service, with synchronisation built in to some modern operating systems (Ubuntu One service, dropbox)

In the case of Operating systems, they too also rely on cloud services. In the case of Linux, the whole OS can be downloaded and installed directly from the Internet and all security fixes and application updates can be installed directly from the Internet.

As we require access to more and more content and information the greater the need will be to have that delivered as an external service as for most people it is impractical and certainly more expensive to run there own data centre.

How will you use the Cloud in the future?

Thank you.
@jr0cket

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