Cloud Computing In Agriculture: 5 Key Questions You Must Answer
October 10, 2012
Grazed from CropLife. Author: Matt Hopkins.
Are you a little unclear when it comes to understanding cloud computing? Partly cloudy on the cloud? You’re not alone. A Google search of "What is Cloud Computing?" returned 245 million results. People want to know about the cloud.
Cloud computing — or the practice of using a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet to store, manage, and process data, rather than a local server — has been gaining serious momentum in the last year in many data-driven industries. And agriculture is taking notice…
In the federal sector, the USDA was the first cabinet-level agency to move its e-mail and productivity applications to the cloud. The U.S. National Resource Conservation Service has taken the help of cloud-computing tools to enable 12,500 of its planners who go out into the fields to interact with farmers. Ag retailers are using cloud computing as part of the precision ag services they offer grower-customers. "There is a hard push for wireless data transfer, mobile Web apps and cloud computing, which are all very rapidly becoming mainstream," says Glen Franzluebbers, ag technology director at Central Valley Ag, a cooperative based in Nebraska…
Read more from the source @ http://www.croplife.com/article/31306/cloud-computing-in-agriculture-5-key-questions-you-must-answer