There are three flavors of cloud computing, a buzzword that, generally speaking, refers to making software, number-crunching ability and storage technology available through servers that are located off-site from where the user is.
Any of the three can be – and are – used today by enterprises to conduct their business. However, not all these ‘flavors’ are equal in terms of security and resilience, and it’s important that organizations know the difference.
The Trouble with Public Clouds
Probably the best-known type is what’s known as the “public cloud.”
In this form, technology services are made available to the general public via the Internet. Gmail, Dropbox and Office 365, to mention some examples, are on public clouds. In some cases, the service is free. In others, the customer pays the cloud provider to make a service available. In both cases, it’s the cloud company’s job to juggle which servers are used when, what security measures are in place, and so on, subject to any service-level agreement.
The trouble with using a public cloud is that your business essentially has to trust the provider to secure the network properly. If something goes haywire, the company can lose control over its data. Continue Reading…
As we’ve seen, the roots of cloud computing extend back to the 1950s, when the operators of large mainframe computers shared capacity on the machines with multiple work stations.
But it’s only been in the past decade or so that the information technology world has begun to turn en masse to the cloud, a buzzword for making software, number-crunching ability and storage technology available through servers located offsite from the user’s physical desktop computer.
The reason more companies are turning to the cloud for their IT is that it brings multiple benefits, some well-publicized, some not. Continue Reading…
The term “cloud computing” is a relatively new buzzword that describes a decades-old approach to sharing computing resources.
In a nutshell, cloud computing refers to making software, number crunching and storage technology available through a network of servers that are located somewhere else. Broadly speaking, cloud computing allows users to employ somebody else’s servers for storing, retrieving and changing data.
What we call cloud computing today has its roots in the 1950s, when computers were primarily big mainframes the size of a room.
Because of the expense of those machines, making efficient use of them was at a premium. So the concept of “time sharing” emerged. Using machines that didn’t have computing power of their own – called “thin clients” – different parties could access the computing power of the mainframe at the same time.
A handful of visionaries helped expand the idea of computers that could talk to each other, a notion that ultimately led to the modern web. John McCarthy in 1961 launched his vision for computing being sold like a public utility, much like water or electricity is made available to the world. J.C.R. Licklider helped create the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, or ARPANET, generally regarded as the predecessor to the Internet. Continue Reading…