A global look at cloud computing

We have seen revolutionary computing technologies come about roughly once each decade in the modern era of computing since around 1945, when computing came to mean computations performed by a machine, not by man. From the mainframe era of the 1960s to the advent of minicomputers in the 1970s, the personal computer (PC) in the 1980s, the growth of the internet and the web in the 1990s, and the explosion of cell phones and other smart, web-connected devices in the past ten years, computing has been reinvented in many ways over time.

Text by David C. Wyld

Inhaltsübersicht

A global look at cloud computing

Cloud computing certainly seems to be the phrase du jour in much of the computing world today, and many experts now think that cloud computing will be “the next big thing.” Indeed, Gartner, the world’s leading IT research company, believes that in the end, the impact of the cloud model will be “no less influential than e-business.” Thus, it should not be surprising that in an October 2009 survey of IT executives conducted by CIO Research, cloud computing was the number one subject of interest among an international panel of information technology decisionmakers.

What is cloud computing? Cloud computing encompasses a whole range of services and can be hosted in a variety of manners (Table 1), depending on the nature of the service involved and the data/security needs of the contracting organization. However, the basic idea behind the cloud model is that anything that could be done in ...