Cloud now the norm, RIP the on-premise server

Grazed from WhaTech. Author: Editorial Staff.

When I was started work, many years ago, the IBM360 ruled the computing universe and networks, even on-premise networks, were almost non-existent. Part of my job as a university laboratory technician was to trot across the campus every afternoon with a computer program represented on a stack of punched cards and offer these up at the great IBM 360. The following day I would go and collect the cogitations of this colossus, spelt out on reams of computer print out.

Then one day that task disappeared overnight: terminals were installed in my department that read the cards and transmitted the data electronically to the IBM360. I tell this tale to reinforce these comments by Peter Coffee of Salesforce.com blogging on GigaOM to argue that the age of cloud has well and truly arrived and the era of dedicated, on-premise hardware is well and truly over…

“Servers were a cost-effective stopgap during the period when processing power got cheaper much more quickly than our planet-wide networks became pervasive and interoperable," he argues, pointing out that Intel’s first microprocessor, the 4004, made its debut in 1971, three years before the Internet was born and 11 years before TCP/IP, which is fundamental to the operation of the Internet, was invented…

Read more from the source @ http://www.whatech.com/cloud-computing/20330-bit416-cloud-now-the-norm-rip-the-on-premise-server

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