The
modern IT and telecommunications employee speaks about the ‘cloud’ more than
your early morning weatherman but what does it actually mean? When you hear
this ubiquitous reference to something in the sky, how does it relate to the
average IT user sitting in front of their PC or taking photos on their phone?
Sure,
it is an easy throwaway line to make you sound impressive at parties (at least
at the parties I attend). “We have gone to the cloud” or “I pulled that out of
our cloud” sounds impressive but many people have minimal understanding of what
being “in the cloud” actually means.
To
gain a better understanding of cloud computing, we should think of the
electricity industry, in particular go back to the early days of electricity.
Once it was realised that there was the wonderful concept known as electricity
with one of the initial uses being a light bulb to light up the night, there
needed to be a way to generate electricity. Sure, you could have your own
coal-fired power station at your house that you could provide fuel for and run
some electrical cabling in your house to use but it was quite obvious that this
was not going to be an efficient method of producing electricity.
Thomas
Edison devised the first commercially viable incandescent light bulb in 1879
but I believe his real genius was the fact that he developed the first large
scale electrical utility when he organised investors to back six jumbo dynamos
that were housed at Pearl Street Station in lower Manhattan. In 1882, Edison
had 85 customers with a total of 400 light bulbs. He owned the electrical
network, he generated the electricity and sold the light bulbs as well. He had
completely wrapped up a vertical market segment!
Edison’s
genius was that he realised that it was inefficient for each location that
wanted a light bulb to also have to generate its own electricity. By connecting
to his electrical network, the electricity could be generated more efficiently
at one central location and that power is then distributed to those who need to
use it.
Fast
forward 134 years, and we have an incredibly complicated system called the
electrical grid that has houses and businesses connected with electrical
cabling to a complicated network of transformers and cabling that goes back to
centralised locations where large amounts of power are produced for the
network. When we turn on a light in our kitchen, we don’t really think about
the power that is produced at a centralised coal-fired power station ‘somewhere
else’ which is then delivered to us by this network of cables and transformers.
We simply flick the light switch and go about our day.
This
electrical example is analogous to our modern cloud computing environment.
We
have an incredibly complicated system of interconnected computers around the
world that you may have heard of. It is called the Internet. ARPANET adopted
the TCP/IP protocol on 1 January 1983 and from there the ‘network of networks’
began to form that is the basis of our modern Internet.
If
you think of the Internet as the electrical grid, cloud service providers are
the equivalent of power generation companies. They generate services on a
massive scale so individual users and businesses can choose the functionality
they require in much the same way that we choose to use power when we flick on
a light switch. While all this may sound largely irrelevant to you, over 90 per
cent of computer users in the world use at least one form of cloud computing.
Think
of e-mail.
If
I go back twenty years in my IT history, I can remember selling clients
Microsoft Exchange Server for their e-mail needs. It was a massive investment.
The physical server required along with the software and setup was easily
$10,000 – maybe more. For a small business of just a few employees, it was
incredibly expensive to have e-mail in their business. Fast forward to today
and you can have basic cloud e-mail services (Gmail; Hotmail; yahoo; etc.) for
free or you can have full-blown modern Exchange e-mail environments for less
than $10 per mailbox per month.
Think
more about the model of paying for an Exchange mailbox. A business somewhere
makes a decision to create a farm of servers and install Exchange server. They
take care of the redundancy and the backups. They own the hardware the purchase
the licenses. They create efficiency by managing a large environment and
generating savings with scale. The business model is then to have lots of
clients paying a small amount of money to use the services offered. And that is
the crux of cloud computing. Organisations create services that they think
people want, they build the infrastructure and connect to the Internet with the
appropriate bandwidth and then sell the services relatively cheaply. Another
popular example is online backup. I know of one provider who will provide
unlimited backup for your individual PC for US$5 per month. That company alone
has over 200 Petabytes of client data stored (1 Petabyte = 1,000 Terabytes).
Their job is to provide the storage space and manage the redundancy and
availability. They simply ask for a small recurring payment in return for the
use of that storage space. Considering the cost of having your own backup media
and the clumsiness of storing that off-site, US$5 per month is pretty cheap for
that usage.
Cloud
computing is not a binary decision. Cloud computing is an à la carte menu.
There are a huge number of services available in the cloud. Your decision is
simply to choose the items from the menu that you require and pay the
appropriate fee. You also need to trust that your cloud provider is going to
continue to deliver on the sales promise.
Welcome
to the cloud!
Mathew Dickerson