Coffee in the clouds
The other day I could for the life of me not remember to
spell a certain word I was looking for to finish an article. My colleague,
bless her, was very quick in telling me to use Google. And it made perfect sense
I was sitting in front of my laptop in any way. 10 seconds later, I found my
word. How amazing has technology become that whatever you may need to know is literally
a mouse click away?
Gone are the wonderful days of picking up the Encyclopaedia
Britannica and exploring the world between a book’s two hard covers. And to
think the first edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica (EB) got published as early
as 1768. And now EB is even available on-line.
That made me think how far technology has come in just
under, I would estimate 20 years. When I was in school computers were only for
the very fortunate and sometimes not even for anyone. As we grew older, so did
technology. Every year something more exciting appeared and before I even knew
it I owned a computer myself and spent most of my time searching for and
researching all kinds of stuff.
I recently discovered that iPads are compulsory in certain
private schools. Have you ever? I can actually see the positive side in this;
at the rate technology is growing, these children will always be aware of what
is happening around the world. What about all the hundreds of thousands of
children that do not have the privilege of owning an iPad? But that is a story for another day.
What is cloud computing?
Experts predict that in 2016, 80% of all of the world’s business
will be done over the internet. When this happens, we will need a major
infrastructure upgrade across the world. Reading up about it and not being the
IT whisperer, I found out a lot of interesting facts about cloud computing. I
will try and explain and not confuse the non-technical folk out there
(including me).
Cloud computing can work for any business
If we think about the
web, we think big; and it is big. Google and Yahoo are some of the biggest
search engines around and a lot of information gets transferred on these sites.
With big sites like these, where all this information gets generated from it is
easy for information to get scrambled and lost. This is where cloud computing comes
in. It does exactly what the name says. All the info gets hosted as a whole by
a single system that gets maintained on site with its own power, storage capabilities
and info management. It also means that any person with internet access can use
any application without ever installing any programs. This makes for less money
spent as businesses do not need to spend a fortune on servers and hardware,
because all the hardware gets maintained by a single source.
The wonders of cloud computing
This is rapidly becoming the way forward as it is easier to
maintain. Power failures, down time and everyday problems (IT related) that
arise can be fixed quicker and more effectively, because of all the systems
being managed by a single system. This also means that companies would be able
to operate without borders. Global integration means that large resource pools
around the world gets integrated into one and so make it easier for all
information to be readily available when needed.
Cloud computing is already implemented
Even more
interesting; some software enterprise applications for CRM, HR and accounting
can be run and maintained through cloud computing. Mobility is the key word when referring to
cloud computing where Facebook and Twitter is a good example of this concept.
Who knows where this can lead
I’m very excited to see how cloud computing will advance in
the next ten years, seeing that it only really kicked off about five years ago.
Maybe one day we wouldn’t even have to meet up with each other for coffee or
dinner. By that time we could probably have our coffee in a cloud.
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