‘Cloud’ computing hot and foggy

Grazed from Stuff.co.nz.  Author:  Hayden Walles.

The tech world is all abuzz about cloud computing but what is it? It’s the next step on the evolutionary path of the internet. It’s a big step forward, but in many ways it is a blast from the past as well.

Cloud computing has an appropriately hazy definition but roughly speaking it is about shifting resources that traditionally resided on personal computers to the internet…

Take the humble word processor, for example. In traditional personal computing you have a word processor program installed on your computer’s hard drive which runs on your computer and which you can use to work on documents which are also saved on the hard drive. Back in the old days, before the internet, it had to be this way because the only resources you had were the ones sitting on your desk.

But that assumption no longer holds. The internet allows those resources to hover in a "cloud" on the internet, ready to be used by people as and when needed.

Maybe you want to edit your documents on different computers, or access them from your phone. So instead of storing them on your hard drive you store them in the cloud – on a server somewhere in the internet. That way you can access them from any computer that has the right word processor.

But you can also move the word processor itself into the cloud.

The word processor program runs on the internet server and you interact with it through a web browser.

The logical conclusion of this approach is something like Google’s Chrome operating system, which comes with only a web browser and a media player. All other functionality is accessed through the cloud.

Cloud storage is already common – think storing photos on the internet – and is a big drawcard for Apple’s newly announced iCloud service, among others. Cloud software is also common for certain applications, such as web mail.

Google, and to some extent Microsoft, have also been pursuing more advanced cloud software with office suites and more.

Companies believe they can make money by offering cloud resources such as storage and software on a subscription or rental basis. But there is also a genuine demand to be able to access our data wherever and however we want.

What is today driven by desire was once driven by necessity. When computers filled entire rooms you bought one for your organisation and everyone shared it. Every user had a terminal, basically just a keyboard and screen which sent keystrokes away to the computer and displayed whatever came back. In cloud computing, the web browser is just like a terminal, merely a means to interact with the distant computer that does the real work.

Cloud computing is very hot right now, but it’s not yet clear if it’s always the best approach. Hopefully all the heat will drive off some of the fog around the cloud and reveal its true value to the future of computing.