When I first heard the term cloud computing, I thought it was just putting your server in a data center and accessing it from anywhere. This is a similar concept, and has its benefits. About a year ago we lost power in our office for about 3 hours. All of our servers were in-house, connected to a big UPS battery backup that lasted all of about 20 minutes. We rely heavily on our servers to report the status and health of our clients’ networks, and to provide remote support and maintenance. It was an awful feeling. I started sending people home where they at least had internet access, but without our servers, it did us no good. It was then we decided we needed to make some changes. We started pricing power generators and special air conditioners. These just weren’t realistic, and still had limitations. We moved all of our critical servers to a datacenter. Redundant power, cooling and internet are just what we wanted to be able to work from anywhere. Even if our office has no power, we can find an internet connection and get to work. Now we host several client servers at our datacenter, so they can have the same benefits.
Cloud computing takes server hosting to a new level. You don’t need to buy a server, you don’t need to buy rack space, you don’t even need to buy software. It’s all on-demand, pay as you go, or paid for by advertisers. Chances are you’ve already used it if you have a Gmail or Hotmail account. All your data is stored on-line, even the program is on-line. All you need is a web browser. Everyone uses a word processor, why buy Microsoft Office for every single PC? Why not just go to a web site and start typing a letter? Google has apps you can run online—word processors, spreadsheet programs, and calendar programs. Yahoo has used cloud computing for years, “renting” out hard drive space for programs to store files or backup data. Microsoft’s CTO Ray Ozzie is pushing cloud computing apps heavy this year, announcing Microsoft Azure. A Microsoft hosted environment for developers to write applications that run online.
But is all this a good idea? You’re giving up control of your data, it’s not on your computer any more, who has access to it? And won’t hosting fees exceed the cost of just purchasing the programs and hardware up front? I say yes, it is a good idea. Most people do a horrible job of backing up their data. Having it online means if your hard drive crashes, you have nothing to worry about. As long as the source is reliable, like Microsoft, Google, or Yahoo, chances are they’re doing better backups than you are. Most servers are obsolete in 5 years and workstations 3. Cloud apps don’t need powerful workstations or servers locally, just a fast internet connection. You could use inexpensive thin client workstations to run programs. Keeping programs up to date can be a challenge. New versions come out, patches need to be installed. All this happens automatically. Being able to run your programs from anywhere with all your data accessible from any machine seems pretty appealing. Don’t throw all your hardware away yet, cloud computing is coming, but it’s not ready to replace every program you run today.
Subscribe to this comment's feed