Inside the Cloud

The cloud, or cloud computing, is not a new concept. It was first written about in the 1966 Douglas Parkhill book, The Challenge of the Computer Utility. In the ’60s, futurists like mathematics professor John McCarthy opined that "computation may someday be organized as a public utility."
 

THE DEVELOPING CLOUD
A public utility is an organization that maintains the infrastructure for a public service, often providing a service using that infrastructure. When I think of the cloud, this is the metaphor I imagine.

There are many definitions for the cloud or cloud computing. The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) defines the cloud as "a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources."

A simpler definition could be, "a means by which organizations or individual users can access computer services, storage or data, even though it is not stored within that organization but elsewhere."

I used the precursor to the cloud in the early 1970s: a "time-sharing" data line to the University of New Orleans for analytical computation. It was quite cool. We used a regular telephone, placing its handset into an acoustical coupler.

In effect, I was using the Internet before Al Gore "invented" it. I used it almost daily as a graduate student and in my early consulting career. I was quite adamant about continued research in my field of expertise. Once a month I would go to the Tulane University Library and use its computers and the program Gofer, which allowed access to articles and research at hundreds of universities and government agencies. This was the Internet before graphical user interface (GUI) browser programs were developed. GUI, pronounced "gooey," simplifies the user’s interaction with the computer by representing programs, commands, files and other options as visual elements, such as icons, pull-down menus, buttons, scroll bars, windows and dialog boxes.
 

THE CLOUD OVERHEAD
I presume that the most important question to anyone in the records and information management (RIM) services industry is, "How does it affect me and my business." Well, let’s put on our thinking caps.

It affects all of us in a most profound way, no matter what business we are in. This is indeed a paradigm shift. For the first time in history, we have a functioning and useful communication and storage utility that we know as the Internet. Nearly 1 billion people currently are online. The dynamics of this were unfathomable 50 years ago. This new technology is delivered and rests on the shoulders of all past technology. Cloud computing is certainly not any different than any other historic milestone. It runs on the tracks of the past while building new tracks for the future.

Cloud computing customers do not own the physical infrastructure (i.e., application software, storage device and infrastructure). Instead, they avoid capital expenditure by renting or leasing the use of these items from a third-party provider.

Providers typically charge by subscription or transaction, with the fee based on the consumer’s usage and by the gigabytes of data in storage. Users consume these resources as a service and pay only for the resources they use. This makes the cloud a virtual platform that is infinitely scalable.

Cloud computing employing the utility computing model, where a service provider makes computing resources and infrastructure available to the customer as needed and charges based on a customer’s specific usage, can reduce cost and improve productivity. Servers and networks are not unnecessarily idle at any time. This can reduce consumer costs while increasing the speed of collaborative provider application development. Side effects of this approach are that overall computer usage rises and costs are reduced.
 

TODAY’S FORECAST
The majority of cloud computing infrastructure at this time consists of reliable services delivered through data centers and built-on servers. Clouds often appear as single points of access for all consumers’ computing needs. Today we find the number of cloud service providers to be very few in number, including IBM, Microsoft, Google and Amazon, because of the extensive reach of services and server farms worldwide. Iron Mountain was among these ranks but dropped out in early 2011.

The cloud is "just-in-time provisioning and scaling of services on shared computing." It becomes an opportunity to completely transform how your business, your employees and your outsourced resources work. The cloud makes it possible for you to scale up and down rapidly, provide services only when and where they are needed in your organization, deliver secure and redundant storage and backup services, provide savings and work process improvement by paying as you go for only the services you need. Increased high-speed bandwidth makes it possible to receive comparable response times from centralized infrastructure at other sites relative to infrastructure at your site.
 

TOMORROW’S FORECAST
One major issue today in cloud computing is that it depends on the issues of confidentiality and security. Regulations like HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley), FACTA (Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act) and others have been developed to protect personal information.

I found Bill Scott in a LinkedIn discussion group. Scott, president of StoreReport and Scott Systems Inc., companies that specialize in cloud computing and Internet-based inventory management services for retailers, had suffered a personal incident that helped him realize the importance of this matter.

Scott writes, "SECURITY is one element of data processing where cloud computing can really shine, because it allows a team of experts, most small businesses could never afford to employ on their own, to take over that responsibility for a fraction of the expense they could implement such an environment themselves."

I agree with Bill.

I hope that this reflection helps you understand how the cloud will be able to help you. I believe that in 20 years this shift will be as significant as the advent of "portable computing" in 1982 with the introduction of the first PC.