Beyond the Cloud

By Shireen Jain

For someone who is slightly more tech-savvy than the average person, they would define the cloud as the delivery of various computing services on the Internet instead of the clouds we see in the sky. Metaphorically, it can also be servers, storage, databases, and software wirelessly drifting across the Internet.

Cloud computing is much more than a clever metaphor. It has risen as an emergent trend that has yielded millions of apps and devices, billions of terabytes of data, and enough caffeine to keep any college student awake. Social media is bombarding with photos and videos stored on the cloud compared to personal computers. Customers have instant access to their data from anywhere, on any device, however they want. Big brands and small startups are experimenting with new ideas for content delivery based on cloud storage. Enterprises are starting to erase internal storage and move everything to cloud storage.

Cloud is a distributed digital infrastructural resource that delivers hosted services through the Internet. The onset of the cloud has offered faster innovation, flexible resources, and economies of scale. You typically pay only for the cloud services you use, which helps lower your operating costs, run your infrastructure more efficiently and scale as your business needs change.

Significant changes in computing have occurred. IT is moving from servers in the data centre to servers anywhere. The software has moved from local computers to the Internet or “cloud”. Hardware is declining in importance, and utility computing has evolved as the norm. All of this has occurred with a technological speed reminiscent of the days of mainframes and minicomputers but without all the turmoil that accompanied the transition.

Cloud-based services have become a popular trend as the need for cloud computing in the market is surging. Cloud-based applications are effortless in their deployment process, as they do not require complex hardware or software installation. It has allowed businesses from healthcare, manufacturing, financial services, telecom and other industries to access these applications while saving money on costs for equipment maintenance, capital expenses and energy consumption.

Cloud computing offers a wide range of benefits to small and large businesses, but there are some cons to cloud computing. The service is an on-demand service, as it allows users to get the required services when they need them without purchasing beforehand. But with all these advantages, a disadvantage of cloud computing is the security risk while using it. These risks include legal liabilities, data liability and identity theft.

Still, the cloud is more flexible, scalable, secure, distributed, and resilient, easily outweighing the few disadvantages. But how did we get here? Years ago, the most common approach for companies to compute infrastructure was to buy servers and install them into data centres or collocations. But servers utilized for data operations are costly because they need lots of storage, consume a great deal of electricity, and require careful maintenance regarding data durability.

In that scenario, only big companies could work with big data. In the early 2000s, big data operations were closely related to the underlying hardware, such as mainframes and server clusters. Although this was profitable for the ones selling hardware, it was expensive and not flexible for the consumers.

Then, with the emergence of Hadoop and other computing frameworks, data could be distributed and replicated across multiple servers by using distributed systems and eliminating the need for that expensive data-replication hardware. By baselining hardware to a basic level and applying all big data concepts to software, the cloud was considered a way to build entire data lakes, data warehousing, and data analytics solutions.

Since then, computing has been in the middle of seismic changes. One major shift is that servers and software are moving out of the data centre and onto our cell phones, tablets, and even cars. Cloud computing has emerged as an attractive alternative. You can get virtual machines, install the software that will handle the data replication, distributed file systems, and entire big data ecosystems without spending lots of money on hardware.

Cloud computing has seen rapid growth in the last decade due to the transformation of IT needs from vendor-developed and proprietary software to Internet-based services that have become a commodity. Cloud computing is effortlessly managed IT as a service, including infrastructure (i.e., data center) and applications (i.e., software). There is no hardware to procure, no infrastructure to maintain and scale to collect, store, process, and analyze data. Major cloud providers such as GCP (Google Cloud Platform), Microsoft Azure, AWS (Amazon Web Services) and others have an ecosystem of analytical solutions specifically designed to handle this growing amount of data and provide insight into various businesses.

The sky is the limit, but the cloud has advanced higher and way beyond it. Cloud computing has changed the way we think about technology. It is easier to connect to networks and has the potential to help people easily access IT without a lot of computer knowledge. Before cloud computing, IT was a niche; but now it is everywhere. A cloud doesn’t necessarily have to be in the sky: business, technology and other fields all have their own ways of using the same concept as it continues to rise as a revolution.