What Is Cloud Computing?
February 28, 2014 3 Comments
You hear about cloud computing in every facet of your life both professionally and personally. Think of it as the next generation in the Internet’s evolution. Most likely you are already using cloud computing and you don’t even know it. For instance have you ever posted a video on YouTube? Perhaps you are a Flickr user. And if you’re one of the 1.15 billion users worldwide using Facebook and if you’ve uploaded a photo – yep, you’re using the cloud.
You can access these files from basically any smartphone or computer that has Internet access. The files are actually stored in a data center – some people will refer to it as in a “computer warehouse”. Many times the terms are used interchangeably – that’s fine it basically refers to the same thing. Inside a computer warehouse there are hundreds of computers and you can bet that they are more powerful than your own computer and have the capacity to store an unbelievable amount of files and information.
It’s a global theory, your files are stored and saved in multiple data centers worldwide. The owner of every data center ensures that your videos, photographs, documents and files are safe and sound. The best part about it is that if something catastrophic happens to one data center all your data will be available from another data center so the actuality of you ever losing your critical data – files, photos, videos is significantly reduced.
Microsoft, Facebook and Yahoo and basically all Internet companies that provide services and cloud-based applications are managing the datacenters. An example that may make it clearer is Google as the company lets you store photos in Picasa, documents in Google Drive, videos in YouTube and emails in your Gmail account. Facebook lets you store photos and videos and makes sharing super easy, you can also play games on your web browser, video chat with friends and send virtual gifts to anyone.
The glory is that you simply use the cloud and spend your valuable time doing the things you really like to do. To use all these services, you don’t have to download anything on your computer, and you’re not limited to a single computer. You don’t have to buy software or worry about upgrades and routine maintenance. Yes, they have you covered.
Technically cloud computing or “the cloud” can be defined as the set of hardware, networks, storage, services, and interfaces that combine to deliver aspects of computing as a service. Cloud services include the delivery of software, infrastructure, and storage over the Internet (either as separate components or a complete platform) based on user demand.
Cloud computing has four essential characteristics: elasticity and the ability to scale up and down, self-service provisioning and automatic de-provisioning, application programming interfaces (APIs), billing and metering of service usage in a pay-as-you-go model. This flexibility is what is attracting individuals and businesses to move to the cloud.
Cloud computing is offered in different forms: public clouds, private clouds, and hybrid clouds, which combine both public and private. Cloud computing can completely change the way companies use technology to service customers, partners, and suppliers. A business like Amazon, already has most of its IT resources in the cloud. They have found that it can eliminate many of the complex constraints from the traditional computing environment, including cost, power, space and time.
Jack Woods a regular contributor to SiliconANGLE, covering the cloud market put together based on extensive surveys and research 20 statistics that every business owner or CIO should think about when considering cloud computing in their organization. ( http://siliconangle.com/blog/2014/01/27/20-cloud-computing-statistics-tc0114/ ).
1. By 2015, end-user spending on cloud services could be more than $180 billion
.2. It is predicted that the global market for cloud equipment will reach $79.1 billion by 2018
.3. If given the choice of only being able to move one application to the cloud, 25% of respondents to their survey would choose storage
.4. By 2014, businesses in the United States will spend more than $13 billion on cloud computing and managed hosting services
.5. Throughout the next five years, a 44% annual growth in workloads for the public cloud versus an 8.9% growth for “on-premise” computing workloads is expected.
6. 82% of companies reportedly saved money by moving to the cloud.
7. More than 60% of businesses utilize cloud for performing IT-related operations.
8. 14% of companies downsized their IT after cloud adoption.
9. 80% of cloud adopters saw improvements within 6 months of moving to the cloud.
10. 32% of Americans believe cloud computing is a thing of the future
.11. There’s an estimated 1 exabyte of data stored in the cloud.
12. More than half of survey respondents say their organization currently transfers sensitive or confidential data to the cloud.
13. CISCO forecasts that global data center traffic will triple from 2.6 zettabytes in 2012 to 7.7 zettabytes annually in 2017, representing a 25 percent CAGR.
14. Global data center traffic will grow threefold (a 25 percent CAGR) from 2012 to 2017, while global cloud traffic will grow 4.5-fold (a 35 percent CAGR) over the same period.
15. From 2012 to 2017, data center workloads will grow 2.3-fold; cloud workloads will grow 3.7-fold .
16. 2014 is the first year the majority of workloads will be on the cloud as 51% will be processed in the cloud versus 49% in the traditional IT space
.17. 545 cloud services are in use by an organization on average
.18. 56% of survey respondents trust the ability of cloud providers to protect the sensitive and confidential data entrusted to them
.19. 59% of all new spending on cloud computing services originates from North American enterprises, a trend projected to accelerate through 2016
.20. 38% of enterprises surveyed break out cloud computing budgets, while 60% include cloud-related spending as part of their enterprise-wide IT budgets.
If you want a personal introduction to cloud computing, please give us a call and we’ll gladly explain what it is, how it works and the benefits you can expect to gain because there will be many.
Debbie Brandt
Marketing Manager
Conquest Technology Services 