Software Revolution, Part II: The Shift to Cloud Computing

Grazed from Forbes. Author: Josh Manchester.

Cloud computing, simply stated, is the ability to use files and applications over the Internet instead of hosting, storing, or processing them on locally managed hardware. Thanks to a series of advances in data storage, security, and transmission, individuals and enterprises can now store their data remotely in a third party facility. Because the data and software in use is not physically stored, it’s as though it were floating in a cloud.

You can easily understand cloud computing from the history of personal computer software over the past decade. Ten years ago, a consumer purchasing a new computer would be extremely conscious of the machine’s processing power as well as the size of its random access memory (RAM) and its hard drive…

This is because so much of what the consumer might wish to do would take place on the machine and by the machine itself. Any software would be installed onto the computer and accessed by the computer’s central processing unit (CPU) and operating system (OS). The amount of RAM available would determine how fast a program might run, and the total memory on the hard drive would determine what programs one could use…

Read more from the source @ http://www.forbes.com/sites/truebridge/2013/09/25/software-revolution-part-ii-the-shift-to-cloud-computing/