A Day in the CLOUDS

One Sunny day Google Inc. chief uttered the term “Cloud Computing” in 2006, and a storm rose over the Silicon Valley. The big guns of the industry started buckling up to launch into the clouds to raise their flags as technology volunteers. Amazon.com inc. popularly known for selling books online, began selling an Elastic Compute Cloud service in 2006 for programmer’s to rent Amazon’s giant computers. Juniper Networks Inc. made gears for transmitting data, dubbed its latest project Stratus. Yahoo Inc., Intel Corp. and a bunch of others recently launched a research program called Open Cirrus.

Although so much development and hype since its origin, Cloud Computing has been a center of controversies and debates. Let’s walk through the trends it has been going through. But first, what good is there in ending a block without a quote, so here’s the first one of my favorites.

The internet industry is on a cloud, whatever that may mean. – The Wall Street Journal

The Cloud

Computing, simply put, is sharing the computing power of devices or applications over the internet. The three major components(SaaS, Paas, Iaas), that can together or individually serve the purpose, make up the concept of Cloud Computing. Most IT professionals say it gets its name from the way internet has been diagrammed over the years as in most of them the internet communication has been pictured showing a client & a server (or client) and everything in-between (hubs, switches, routers, ISPs etc) wrapped up in a cloud.

There are three major types of clouds available

1. Public Cloud: This is the most popular of the three and, being most economical, is widely adopted. This kind of service is shared among all subscribers regardless of one being an organization, a group, or an individual. These are generally free or pay-per-use services like Amazon AWS, Google App Engine, Microsoft Azure et.
2. Private Cloud: This is more costly and thus, less adopted service. This is generally taken by groups of organization who want their data to be privately handled and transferred only between their associate organizations. A few services are GigaSpaces Cloudify, Cumulogic, ActiveState Stackato.
3. Personal Cloud: This is a service much in its infancy, and is only yet experimental. This is for homes or individuals to use. The personal cloud services that currently exist are Box.net, Dropbox, iCloud, and Evernote.

So the Cloud Computing is already a widely grown but still evolving concept resulting in IT professionals tending to associate even non-cloud structured technologies to Cloud Computing. And with this goes our second quote of the day.
The internet industry is the only industry that is more fashion driven than women’s fashion.
Oracle Inc. Chief Executive Larry Ellison chastised to whole issue of cloud computing, saying the term was overused and being applied to everything in the computer world.

The Raining Trends

According to a survey of 39 major tech firms released by North Bridge Venture Partners, here are the 9 hottest trends in Cloud Computing for 2012.

1. The key that opens all doors is Trust:Half of all respondents said they were confident that cloud solutions are viable for mission critical business applications.
2. Scalability:Fifty-seven percent of companies said it was the top reason that they switched to the cloud. (Business agility was a close second.)
3. Security is the talking point: The cloud may be maturing, but security anxiety is the top reason companies don’t make the switch — 55 percent of respondents expressed concern about it. (Rounding out the top three: regulatory compliance and vendor lock-in.)
4. SaaS, the golden sparrow: A whopping 82 percent of respondents said they use software-as-a-service offerings today. An additional six percent said they’d use it within five years.
5. PaaS and IaaS: There’s a lot of interest in platform-as-a-service and infrastructure-as-a-service offerings. Forty percent of respondents use PaaS today but 72 percent said they’d adopt it in the next five years; IaaS, 51 percent to 66 percent.
6. Efficiency is the name of the game: At 43 percent, backup and archiving was the number one use case, followed by business continuity (25 percent), collaboration tools (22 percent) and big data processing (19 percent).
7. Over long term, absent of other barriers, economy always wins: Fifty-three percent of respondents said that the cloud leads to a lower total cost of ownership, or TCO, and a less complex IT workflow.
8. Public, Private or Hybrid: Forty percent of respondents said they are deploying public clouds; 36 percent said they’re going with a hybrid approach. But 52 percent said they’d be using a hybrid approach within five years.
9. Big data & Analytics: Eighty percent of respondents deemed it the area most likely to be disrupted by cloud computing. Analytics, too.

The Rainbow

The fine line is, the Cloud Computing is still evolving and in its early stages only. It is, for sure, going to change the way we look at computing. There will be no needs for buying and installing costly software locally, buying hardware infrastructures to support the high performance requirements, spending millions on creating and maintaining huge data houses, and then after all the hard work no headache about catering to the changing technologies.
So we conclude with the last quote, Cloud Computing is the next big thing in IT industry after The Web.

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