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Plugging into clouds

Photo: Rajesh Kumar Singh

On cloud nine Besides revelry, there is yet another reason to look to the heavens now

You want to expand your business online and require a lot of resources in terms of more computers and processing power. But you don’t have those many bucks to go shopping for them. What do you do then? Look up to the heavens. Hey! Don’t y ou see the cloud that rains processing power, holds your data and disgorges that whenever you want? This cloud doesn’t wait for monsoon to unburden itself, though. You just have to plug into that. Server farms, reared by computing vendors like Joyent, Akamai, Enki, XCalibre, SalesForce.com, Amazon and others are located in remote places and do the heavy lifting.

With the cost of installing software and maintaining servers for any upgradation gobbling up vast resources, individuals, companies and small entrepreneurs are increasingly plugging into the ‘cloud.’

Wikipedia says: “The term Cloud Computing derives from the common depiction in most technology architecture diagrams, of the Internet or IP availability, using an illustation of a cloud. The computing resources being accessed are typically owned and operated by a third-party provider on a consolidated basis in Data Center locations. Target consumers are not concerned with the underlying technologies used to achieve the increase in server capability, and is sold simply as a service available on demand.” “Upgradation of systems sucks up lots of resources, so cloud computing is major innovation in IT,” says Prabhakar M. C., a techie. If you are working on a file and want to retrieve it, you need not e-mail it to yourself. You can just access your files and folders---your password-protected data that resides in the cloud--- on your laptop, mobile or any desktop with Internet connection from anywhere.

“This is really good in providing enterprise solutions,” says Arun, a developer who is juiced about the possibilities of things moving increasingly and inexorably online for the people to access anywhere and everywhere. As technologist George Gilder puts it, it is “frantically taking the computer-on-a-chip and multiplying it in massively parallel arrays, into a computer-on-a-planet.”

In order to concentrate on their real jobs, companies are outsourcing their sever and computing needs.

Brought into effect by SalesForce.com in 1999, the concept of software as service lets businesses manage their stuff online without any additional cost of upgrading systems. Amazon.com is really innovative in this. It offers S3 (Simple Storage Service), EC2 (Elastic Computing Cloud), SimpleDB (a database management tool) --- storage space, processing power and tool for managing database -- to run the company in the cloud. However, there are real concerns that make cloud customers freak out about security of confidential data on somebody else’s servers being hacked into and the web connections conking out in the middle of business hours.

“I guess, we have to row these two boats, desktop and online, for a foreseeable future,” says Murali, a trend spotter who keeps his head in the clouds and feet firmly on ground.

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