The IT of business - why the cloud is a not new idea

There is increasing awareness and publicity surrounding cloud computing today, but cloud computing is not a new concept. Mainstream computing first started off with the mainframe, terminal computing where the device sitting on the user's desk was just a terminal accessing the mainframe, which did the processing and number crunching.

After this there was a paradigm shift to personal computers and client/server computing, which allowed the workload to be shared between the client, typically a Windows desktop and a Windows server. This was great because it allowed for the ability to work "offline" from the corporate network, using tools like Microsoft Office, Word, Excel, PowerPoint etc. This shift also brought about simplicity to computing - you no longer needed a programming background, everything became more intuitive with Windows and a graphical user interface.

The niche of mobile access to corporate information

The idea of mainframe computing remained, but evolved; it basically merged the idea of mainframe computing and gave it a Windows front-end. Companies like Citrix and Microsoft (with Terminal Services) dominated this market. The resource-intensive work, processing, memory consumption etc. was based on the server and the desktop device just displayed the resulting video and sent the keyboard clicks and mouse movements up the wire. Devices could be anything - thin clients, mobiles, Linux devices, Apple devices, they could all display and run Windows applications at lightning speed. With the growth of Wide Area Networking, connectivity of branches and an increase in telecommuting, these products addressed the niche of mobile access to corporate information.

Over time, though, technology and programming was changing, the Internet was evolving and the foundations for Web2.0 were being laid.

Becoming platforms of interaction

Websites were changing from being static pages of information to becoming platforms of interaction between people, companies and brands. HTML 5 has brought about an evolution as to how businesses and websites can interact and has made web-based cloud computing possible. The other key component of cloud computing has been the ubiquity of Internet access, without which the promise and benefits of cloud computing would not have come to fruition. Fortunately for us at the southern tip of Africa, the explosion in data consumption has been enabled by the arrival of undersea cables that have increased our international throughput connectivity. This increased throughput on the cables also brought about lower costs of Internet access, on both fixed line and cellular.

We are now at a point where all this evolution in technology has merged to allow us to exploit tools like Microsoft's 25 Gb Skydrive and Office 365, Google Apps and a whole host of other services like Facebook (it is a cloud service and stores approximately 100bn of all the world's photos), Twitter and even our own home-grown product MXiT.

Two distinct camps

From a business perspective, we can divide cloud computing into two distinct camps: public and private. With private cloud computing, all it means is that you take your infrastructure and move it into a datacentre like Rackspace, Teraco, Amazon S3 and EC2 or Internet Solutions. You either put your server into their rack or you rent some space on one of their servers, add your application(s), give web access to your users and you are good to go. The benefit is that you don't have to worry about the infrastructure sitting on premises and you leverage off their infrastructure like power management, data access, highly secure access. It does not matter should a disaster strike at your premises, your priceless data is safe at the host. You can be up and running relatively quickly as your data will be safe and secure. But this does not exploit fully the benefits of cloud computing. Yes, your data is in a safe place, and you are leveraging off the host's infrastructure, but surely we can benefit more if we share more. With private cloud computing, you are still responsible for your software upgrades and maintenance and depending on your solution also for hardware upgrades.

Public cloud computing really amazing

And this is where public cloud computing is really amazing. Typically this is where we see solutions from companies like Google (Apps, Gmail, Picasa etc), Microsoft (Office 365) and Salesforce.com. The desktop is OS agnostic, but access to information is in the same or similar format across the board. The pervasiveness of Internet browsers on all platforms allows us to use productivity tools like Google Apps. Google has also opened up APIs and allowed developers and software houses to make their apps available to Google Apps customers via its Enterprise Market Place, some free, some at a premium and some using a freemium model.

In a typical public cloud solution, hardware and software upgrades are the responsibility of the provider. Your business will always be on the latest version of software and hardware. The public cloud provider also ensures that the servers are being used at their correct capacity and that your data is always secure and inaccessible to people who are not authorised to have access.

Cloud computing has evolved and should be a viable option for any business. Just ensure that the same level of testing and planning takes place as with any IT implementation.

About Raj Harie

Raj Harie is cumulus nimble navigator at groupXLR8.
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