Week 7 - Cloud Computing

Future of Computers

This week we started the lecture by going through what we have learnt so far. It was good to recap. This was then followed by a lecture about Cloud Computing. This is about delivering hosted services over the internet service which is managed by the provider. Cloud computing consists of 

• Virtual computers / servers
• Data Storage Capacity
• Network Capacity
• Communication and Messaging Capacity

Cloud computing has two elements. Public Cloud Computing and Private Cloud Computing. This therefore has three categories.

1. Infrastructure as a service. Some companies will make use of this for servers and for storage.
2. Platform as a service. Some companies will use this for product development or the combination of the two.
3. Software as a service. Individuals may use it as a software.

An example of cloud computing is that iPad lets you save your essentials in to a drop box which is effectively cloud computing. The following video clip gives a further understanding of what cloud computing is all about.

How Cloud Computing Works

When your work and responsibilities as an executive or a manager involve ensuring that all of your employees have the right hardware and software needed to complete their tasks, you may need to buy computers but also ensure that you also purchase software or software licenses to  enable employees have the necessary tools they require. This would mean whenever you have a new hire you may have to buy more software or ensure that the current license allows another user.  

As a manager you may want to find ways to reduce spending more money. This is where cloud computing comes in for the rescue.

Cloud computing allows you to load one application instead of installing a suite of software for each computer. This one application will allows workers to log into a Web-based service which hosts all the programs the user needs to complete their job.  Remote machines owned by another company will run almost everything such as email, word processing to complex data analysis programs. This is called cloud computing. 

Cloud computing reduces the need for the local computers to do all the heavy lifting in running applications. Instead the only requirement by the user’s computer needs is that it should be able to run the cloud computing systems interface software, which is like using a web browser and the rest of the work will be taken care of by cloud’s network.



Reference

Strickland J (2012), How Cloud Computing Works, [Online], http://computer.howstuffworks.com/cloud-computing/cloud-computing.htm,  [Accessed 4th March 2012]