Ride the Cloud.  Will it bring a storm or sunshine?

This column does not have a single author, but is submitted by a number of experts that contribute regularly to our news source.  Some are in Canada, some in the UK and one is in the far east

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Cloud computing is the new rage and it may rival the rise of the Internet in terms of how it changes our lives.   The idea behind it is to remove from your PC Desktop all those familiar programs like MS Word, Excel, Power Point, Movie Maker, Adobe tools and others.

Where do these programs go?  They will reside on Internet Servers all over the world so that when you type in a letter, the program that does the formatting, makes things bold and puts in tables will be on the Net and not stored on your computer disk.

This is a really big deal and behind the scenes tons of venture capital is going into it.  The platform is high speed internet as we've mentioned in a prior article about the Cloud.

What's required and what are the risks?

Since you sitting on the Cloud will not know where your tools will be running, you may lose them sometimes when a server somewhere goes down.  This means that immense backup facilities will have to be built into the Cloud.  If a server goes down, it has to have a mirror image someplace for all your current programs.

Our PCs go down too, but we feel somehow in control of that, if not totally.  We try to back up our files on big disks that are very inexpensive.  We'll have the same ability on the Cloud, but it will be remote and some program will have to do it in an automatic manner.

So what should we watch?

The first thing to watch is the development that is taking place in the browsers.  Google with Chrome, Microsoft with Internet Explorer and Apple with their Safari offering must build a whole new world.

The Cloud will become real only through them.

Of course Microsoft will keep the base that they have, but the operating system is sure to move slowly off the desktop and onto server farms distributed world-wide.

It's not impossible to take an existing problem, let's say health care records for doctors in Ontario and put that system on the Cloud.  It's a big job, but with that application it has great economic payback.

 The hardware and software that a doctor and hospitals have to buy, will be reduced dramatically because the cost can be spread across the lower layers of the Cloud.

On the other hand to take all the applications that everyone uses and put them on the Cloud is akin to the old mainframe mentality like all your eggs are managed on a central computer.

In the case of the Cloud, however, there is no central computer.  There is a vast interconnected network called 'The Internet' and then there are servers on millions of farms world-wide.

It seems risky and dangerous, but it appears that it will happen gradually over the next ten years. 

20/12/2009 06:45 PM

What's required?

1. The network is crucial and there has to be a solid base for it in fiber optic networks and beyond.  This stuff won't run on dial-up and DSL.
2. There is no current strategy for mirroring and backing up everything that goes on the net.  Geography and Security are important.
3. There are no standards to write programs for the Cloud.

The Cloud over the next 25 years will be very good for technology startups so they can float on it.  Right now there is no standard for them to write their programs for the Cloud dream.  So the early work, will most likely have to be redone unless either Microsoft and/or Google establish the base standards.

Much as people disliked Microsoft's tremendous growth, they did more for small high tech business startups than any other company because they established a de facto standard.  If you were going to create technology and it did not run on Windows, you failed as a small company or had a very limited  market.

They were always attacked for being unfair, but people found a way to use the base that they established.

A false start to the world of the desktop was the powerful operating system Unix which has  morphed into a number of variants like Linux.  These systems are not used on the desktop by anybody other than the Guru types.  They have become dominant on the server platform.

You are reading this article as supplied off a server someplace running Unix.

Pay attention to how the browsers develop.  They are the forerunner for the Cloud.

For an earlier article click here