Your commercial awareness dose
Cloud computing is simply the availability of a variety of computing services – including networking, databases, analytics and intelligence, storage, and servers, to name a few – over the internet. This effectively allows for data centers to be available to many users, which can be hugely useful for companies. Cloud computing can benefit firms and corporations as their up-front IT infrastructure costs can be minimized as they don’t have to purchase their hardware and software.
Further, applications can both run and be set up faster and more effectively in times of peak demand. This is because, typically, consumers only pay for the amount of cloud ‘space’ or storage as they are using at one time on a pay-as-you-go model. There are different types of cloud computing, which can broadly be speaking be separated into public, private, and hybrid categories.
A public cloud is both owned and operated by a third-party provider, who delivers their services over the internet. Within this category, all supporting infrastructures are managed by the cloud provider; Amazon Web Services are an example of this.
In the private cloud, resources are used and accessed by a single company only, which can still be hosted by a third-party service. Nonetheless, a private cloud is found within the company’s on-site data center, and its services are run and upheld on a private network. A hybrid cloud allows for further flexibility, as services can be shared between the private network and that of the public.
Originally, notions of ‘time-sharing’ came about in the 1960s. Funding for a project at MIT allowed for the development of technology that allowed for a computer to be used by two or more people simultaneously. According to Keith D. Foote, in its early developmental stage, “‘the cloud’ was used to express the space between the end-user and the provider”. Now, cloud computing is a multi-billion dollar industry and one which continues to grow.
Steve Ranger notes that in 2021, around “one-third of enterprise IT spending will be on hosting and cloud services this year, indicating a growing reliance on external sources of infrastructure, application, management and security services”. He suggests that global spending on such services will reach $260bn this year.
International Business Machines Corporation (also known by the acronym IBM) is an international tech company, who was hugely fundamental to the development of cloud computing services. IBM Cloud includes Infrastructure as a service [IaaS], software as a service [SaaS], and platform as a service [PaaS]. These services are offered through hybrid, public, and private modes. They announced a partnership with Google in 2007 to promote cloud computing within universities. Now know as the IBM SmartCloud brand, they offer their customers infrastructure and software are services of three types: SmartCloud Foundation, SmartCloud Services, and SmartCloud Solutions.
Amazon is the owner of one of the largest cloud computing platforms, ‘Amazon Web Services’, which was launched in 2002. It’s seen steady growth, reporting 37 per cent yearly growth in 2019, and accounting for 12 per cent of Amazon’s total revenue; all of Amazon’s retail sites having been moved to the platform back in 2012. Amazon Web Services’ customer base includes NASA, Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, and Netflix.
There is a growing market for cloud computing, and companies such as IBM and Amazon have done well to keep abreast of the rising tide of consumer demand. There are, however, limitations. Bruce Schneier states that “cloud computing is cheaper because of economies of scale […] fewer options at a much cheaper price”. Further factors for considerations include privacy and confidentiality, as there is the potential for sensitive data to be accessed by non-intended uses. Ultimately, cloud computing has the advantages of lowering costs and allowing organisations to focalise on competence rather than infrastructural and technological issues: though some issues may arise, there is little doubt that the Cloud has become a necessity in most of our everyday lives.
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