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The “Cloud” is actually the Internet, but with additional capabilities. Essentially, cloud computing means that information is no longer stranded on your own individual machines (desktops, laptops, smartphones, pads) but is instead combined into one digital “cloud” available anywhere at the touch of a finger through many different devices, managed in cyberspace on someone else’s equipment. This is much like we access our electricity through an electrical “grid” which distributes power from a huge electrical plant somewhere else (See The Best Analogy, below).
In addition to browsing websites or sending e-mail, the “Cloud” can provide (free or leased) programs (for example, word processing or databases, perhaps through “Google Apps”) over the Internet, rather than requiring the installation of each program on every one of your devices. Moreover, it can store and share on the Web all of the data you create using those programs. There are many different types of clouds - public, private and hybrid (e.g. where a company may run most of its business in-house, but outsource some particularly burdensome tasks, like data analysis).
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The upside: Your programs are always available anytime, anywhere, so long as you have a computer and an Internet connection. And it is probably less costly than purchasing all of the programs and storage hardware outright for every computer. For companies, the Internet has always been a way to store huge amounts of data on an outside server farm; now, for individuals, as the amount of data generated increases during our digital lives, it is becoming a more attractive storage alternative. From simple off-site file services like Drop Box to full off-site drive backup services like Acronis, the cloud is becoming more attractive to home and small office users as well.
The downside: You must have an active Internet connection, usually broadband speed, to access the program and the data, and there’s always the security worry you have when someone else is storing your data for you. If you decide not to use the Cloud sometime later, you don’t own any software. If you have a large organization and your host goes out of business (as did Coghead in 2009, data transferred to SAP), it can take weeks or months to transfer terabytes of data and, at say 10 cents per gigabyte, this can add up to tens of thousands of dollars. Even the enormous cloud providers can go down: Witness Sony (April 20 through May 14, 2011 and beyond), Hotmail (December, 2010 - when it came back on line, 17,355 e-mail accounts went missing [eventually returned]), Windows Phone Marketplace (April, 2011 down for extended maintenance - isn’t Microsoft large enough to build in maintenance without disruption?), the Feburary, 2012 Leap Day Bug which caused the Azure outage and Amazon’s EC2 cloud service (which struggled for four days in April, 2011 to get its customer data and databases back on line after a human error occurred as the result of a configuration error during a scheduled update during the middle of the night - don’t fall for their excuse that the system was still up 99.5% ‘cause it doesn’t matter if your data isn’t available!). Don’t forget that some types of data (i.e. medical, defense, technological) must be stored and/or transmitted only within the U.S.
Also there’s the general security issue: If you store everything in the cloud and your computer is hacked or your laptop stolen, it’s a simple matter for someone to get all of your data, something that might not happen if you store your data on external devices such as tapes, disks or flash drives.
And the above illustrates a dark side of the cloud: Because it is anonymous as well as powerful, hackers can use it to propagate viruses over the Internet without fear of being caught and at very little expense, sometimes only a dollar or two per hour. And, not to be too pessimistic, but what if there is a war or cyber-terrorism brings down the net. Where would you be then?
Caution: If you’re a business, you’ll probably find that vendors are all jumping on the bandwagon, claiming that their services and apps are “clouds”. Unless they fit the definition (below), they’re just repackaging their products and services. Cloud computing isn’t really a completely new concept, but the most recent scale expansion of so-called “hosted software” (see ASP), which has been around for over a decade. The difference between cloud and ASP is that, with ASP an outside firm hosts an instance of an on-premises application for you. True cloud providers are both “multitenant” (that is, all clients run on the same vendor stack) and “version now” (every one is on the current version). So don’t confuse ASP with cloud. Also, don’t confuse the “elasticity” model with the “utility” model. An in-house virtualized computer environment, while it centrally serves multiple computers, is not a cloud, because it is not a utility hosted over the Internet (see below). See also D2C (D2D2C).
At its highest (most abstract) level, cloud computing is defined as computing power or services that are delivered over the Internet by an outside company as a utility and are billed based upon usage. (The old SaaS model rented entire packages of software primarily to larger business users and charged hefty monthly or yearly server fees; but small businesses and consumers can’t afford and won’t pay for this. The new pay-for-use-only model has been driven by their needs. Smaller businesses, even startups, can now compete by using computer power that would have previously been unimaginable for their size. And even larger businesses are happy to pay only to level off spikes in usage, when and as needed.) Governments, as well, have found it advantageous to use cloud computers rather then incur the large expenses involved in upgrading computer systems and software.
The Best Analogy: In 2008, Nicholas Carr wrote a book titled “The Big Switch” which traced the way that companies which started out with their own giant electrical generators in-house eventually switched to purchasing only the electricity they required when they needed it from a select group of large providers, freeing themselves up to focus on their core business. Arguably, computer power has reached the same level and appears to be resolving itself the same way through the use of cloud computing, a pay-per-drink provision of computing power freeing businesses to focus on their core business while large computing suppliers provide the heavy lifting.
Presently, the big three hosts are Microsoft (Azure), Amazon (Amazon Web Services) and Google. Below them are the incumbent providers, IBM, AT&T, Verizon, HP and the like. To be safe, it’s best to get a cloud provider that has SSAE 16 (formerly SAS 70) certification.
Cloud services fall into three main categories: SaaS (“software as a service”), such as salesforce.com or Gmail; PaaS (“platform as a service”), such as force.com or Google Apps and IaaS (“infrastructure as a service”), such as Amazon web services). [See the chart below.] “Software As A Service” [pronounced “saas”], refers to a practice of delivering software to a customer over the internet on a rental basis, rather than the traditional “pay and own” model. Users tap software from the “cloud” rather than buying it outright and loading it onto their computer, often paying for usage in increments of time. This term has generally replaced the earlier terms ASP (Application Service Provider) and On-Demand. These “cloud” offerings include databases [Google, IBM, Yahoo, Amazon], backup [Mozy/EMC], storage [IDrive], virtual servers [Terramark], online storefronts, payment processing, CRM and other vertical applications. In addition, web giants such as Amazon [EC2 - “Elastic Computer Cloud 2”/Cloudfront Simple Storage Service (“S3”)], Google and EMC are now making their vast infrastructures available to a variety of web-accessable services for a very reasonable charge (e.g. 10 cents/hr, 10 cents/Gb). In October, 2008 Microsoft announced its own cloud computing system, Azure.
Offshoots of SaaS are PaaS [pronounced “pass”](a/k/a cloudware) where users are renting not just the individual web-based applications, but an operating system to run those applications, a network as well as a service provider that will perform basic maintenance on that network when necessary; and IaaS [pronounced “I as”] for Infrastructure as a Service, where the user is renting hourly or monthly the entire system: Virtual servers, storage space, virtual routers, switches and other hardware, networking capabilities, an operating system and applications, with the cloud provider (“Host”) offering even more extensive maintenance and services. All this, with the ability to “scale” up or down whenever the requirements change. Even the Federal government has experimented with cloud computing: The Defense Information Systems Agency (“DISA”) has awarded contracts for on-demand computing services.
Computer clouds are rapidly reshaping the way businesses access IT services. Cloud computing differs significantly from the earlier type of less-than-successful network and web based services, known as MSPs (Managed Service Providers), which typically required customers to procure processing and storage capacity in discreet units of a particular type of server over a set contract period. Also, there is a huge difference in scale, because Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and the like can offer such vast data centers, and therefore computing power, at a magnitude never before available. There are different types of clouds - while Google may be ideal for sifting through data, salesforce.com may be better for running business applications like customer management and accounting software, even allowing companies to write their own programs to run on its servers. In 2008, IBM (Blue Business Platform) and Google announced a plan to roll out a worldwide network of servers from which consumers and businesses will tap everything from online soccer schedules to advanced engineering applications through the cloud model. Google has also introduced the Chrome browser, which is cloud friendly. And, not to be outdone, Microsoft developed its own cloud applications, known as Azure, in early 2009. A year later, Microsoft introduced the beta of Office 365, which is an amalgam of Exchange Server, SharePoint Server and Lync, for a monthly cost between $10 and $25 per user, which gives small businesses (say, 25 or so employees) the benefits of large users. In 2007, when Microsoft introduced its “Live” series of services, it introduced Skydrive (originally Windows Live Folders”), a free cloud storage service for up to 25 GB of personal storage with a 100 Mb file limit.
There’s also a service known as “cloudbursting”, which is the ability to increase capacity by provisioning resources from an additional cloud, a kind of “spillover” effect between clouds.
Confused? When I wrote this description in 2009, almost no one knew what the cloud was. Surveys show that even now 80% of people are still confused by the term. However, they may still be using it (see figures on sidebar), especially if they own an Apple device. Users’ e-mail, tax preparation software, and online gaming may come through the cloud, even though they don’t know it. So, too, Facebook and other social networks. And cloud storage and file sharing programs like Dropbox, Box and Instagram. Much of the discussion above, however, is for those businesses who are making the move to provide such customers cloud-based services.
See the chart below for a graphic explanation:
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