The Cloud - Nothing New

The Cloud - Nothing New

The most widely over used term for those who haven't a clue what they are speaking of is the cloud. There is no such thing as the cloud. That is unless your referring to the internet as it was conceived in the 60's put forth in 1982 and became popular in the 90's. The term you youngsters refer to as the cloud has been around since before you were born. The only major change is where certain services reside. I.e.; your hosted email, websites, apps corporate data, etc. Anyone can set up a server room with mass storage and a large pipe of bandwidth, offer their services to everyone else and call it the GREAT CLOUD. Cloud: A pool of computing resources (servers, storage, applications, and voice services) that is provided as-needed to businesses from a provider’s network, eliminating the need for on-site equipment. Cloud technologies enable IT departments to increase or add capabilities as needed without purchasing equipment, using office space and power to operate and cool it. It provides businesses a predictable, subscription-based, pay-per-use way to fund IT. The major change in our IT infrastructure is the need for private servers and hardware. Services that were once extremely expensive and required a staff of programmers and administrators are now offered by companies such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft to name a few of the largest. Although these services are offered in such a manner, consider who manages them. The programmers and administrators have simply moved from your site to a much larger one handling more accounts in new ways. Large corporations will never relinquish control of their IT service departments to such technology (They may collaborate together.) Why? Because they are the cloud. Any company that has a staff of over 5000 employees has no need for the so called cloud. They provide the department funding to administer their own internal systems and servers. It is these types of companies that make up the so called cloud...