You almost can’t go a day without hearing something about “The Cloud”. Yet, according to a recent survey by the NPD Group, only 22% of U.S. Consumers are familiar with the term “Cloud Computing”. So I thought I’d take this opportunity to, pardon the expression, clear the air.
The Internet has come a long way in the last 20+ years. In the early days, the Internet served as a basic tool for publishing and viewing (browsing) static information. Click, and a page of information pops up for you to read. It was great because the user could direct the experience. Then, in the mid 1990s, transaction processing came along, and Amazon was born. Click, and you could buy a book. Online shopping probably did more to advance computer literacy and adoption than any other single application.
In recent years, due largely to improvements in broadband technology; high speed Internet access became cheap and readily available. As a result, Internet software development has taken a dog-leg skyward. Developers are now able to create dynamic, interactive web-based applications rivaling the capabilities of programs running on our desktop computers. Add in the ability to store your documents in state-of-the-art secure data centers, and we have a game-changer. The result has been christened “the Cloud”; which derives from the cloud pictograph that is traditionally used in network diagrams to represent the Internet.
Moving the storage and the lion’s share of processing power from the desktop to the Cloud, opens a vast array of benefits. See “4 Things Every CEO Needs to Know About Cloud Computing”
Next Post: Public Cloud vs. Private Cloud
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