What is cloud computing?
What Is Cloud Computing?
Everyone in the technology world is talking about it… and a lot of people in the business world are asking the
same question, “What is cloud computing, and what does it mean for my business?”
Cloud computing platforms are growing in popularity, but why? What unique advantages does a cloud computing architecture offer to companies
in today’s economic climate? And what is cloud computing, anyway?” Let’s explore the cloud computing infrastructure and its impact
on critically important areas to IT, like security, infrastructure investments, business application development, and more.
Most IT departments are forced to spend a significant portion of their time on frustrating implementation, maintenance, and upgrade projects
that too often don’t add significant value to the company’s bottom line. Increasingly, IT teams are turning to cloud computing technology
to minimize the time spent on lower-value activities and allow IT to focus on strategic activities with greater impact on the business.
The fundamental cloud computing infrastructure has won over the CIOs of some of the world’s largest organizations—these once-skeptical
executives never looked back after experiencing first-hand the host of benefits delivered by cloud computing technology.
Cloud Applications
ActiveCloud delivers software as a service over the Internet, eliminating the need to install and run the software application on your own computer which simplifies maintenance and support.
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History.
The underlying concept.
Cloud computing dates back to the 1960s, when John McCarthy opined that "computation may someday be organized
as a public utility."
Almost all the modern-day characteristics of cloud computing (elastic provision, provided as a utility,
online, illusion of infinite supply), the comparison to the electricity industry and the use of public, private, government and
community forms was thoroughly explored in Douglas Parkhill's 1966 book, The Challenge of the Computer Utility.
The actual term "cloud" borrows from telephony in that telecommunications companies, who until the 1990s primarily offered dedicated
point-to-point data circuits, began offering Virtual Private Network (VPN) services with comparable quality of
service but at a much lower cost.
By switching traffic to balance utilization as they saw fit, they were able to utilize their
overall network bandwidth more effectively. The cloud symbol was used to denote the demarcation point between that which was the
responsibility of the provider from that of the user. Cloud computing extends this boundary to cover servers as well as the network
infrastructure. The first scholarly use of the term “cloud computing” was in a 1997 lecture by Ramnath Chellappa.
Source: Wikipedia.org
