Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is a system of technologies and services that have commoditized IT to make it more readily consumable, scalable, and cost-effective for everyone. Cloud computing is about flexibly finding hardware to run your software on. There is no incentive (contradictory to your statement) of software to live in many different places to “enrich its life”. Cloud computing is a concept of decentralized, readily available data and collaboration. The idea of cloud computing is what allows me to freelance, working largely from home.

Cloud computing is not an “all or nothing” process. Firms can select functions to go into the cloud, according to their confidence and need. Cloud computing is beyond being the new IT buzzword. It is a computing paradigm where business applications are allocated to a combination of connections, and software and services are accessed through a web browser over a network, known as “The Cloud”. Cloud computing is the realization of the earlier ideals of utility computing without the technical complexities or complicated deployment worries. As part of such services, vendors should be providing customers with an environment that is both economical and scalable while being flexible enough to meet the needs of the end-user.

Cloud computing is the hardware equivalent of automatic teller machines. The whole idea is that you don’t have to deal with people to get your application deployed, scaled, monitored and managed. Cloud computing is all the rage and being heavily promoted by the likes of Google and Microsoft. Well, forget about it. Google Apps and Zoho are examples of companies providing common application software. Both systems even provide an offline mode for times when users aren’t connected to the Internet. Google search arguably falls into this bucket. StrikeIron’s Web services that verify and cleanse data are also examples, as are some of Amazon’s lesser known services that offer up historical pricing data and the like.

Google has a full online office suite, but if you feel that the big G is powerful enough, thank you, then zoho.com offers a similar, if not even richer, range. Web applications can now mimic desktop software, so the kinds of keyboard shortcuts used on your desktop spreadsheet programme, for example, are now possible on the web equivalent. Google operates several well-known cloud computing services. It offers its users applications such as e-mail, word processing, spreadsheets and storage, and hosts them “in the cloud” — in other words, on its own servers, not yours.