In the IT industry, computing models tend to change every decade or so. In the early era of computing, computers were mostly used as single user systems without any connectivity concerns of any kind. Then came the time, when multiuser systems and networks revolutionized the whole computing scenario. Presently, the trend is going around utility computing and loosely coupled systems in which applications are designed to work in a distributed environment with different parts running on different systems that may be running anywhere across the globe. Also, the concept of Virtualization has taken a great level of popularity especially in the corporate environments where virtualising server hardware turns out to be great for cutting IT and ITES costs. All this is happening due to the increasing reach of high speed broadband internet connections to more and more people at affordable prices as well as coming out of advance and speedier hardware that can handle things like these. But this year, 2008, has seen emergence of a new kind of computing model named by experts as Cloud Computing. As companies and corporations are migrating towards virtualised and decentralized systems and with developers moving towards the software + service architecture, the era of cloud computing has just begun.
The term cloud essentially signifies “The Internet”. Computing in the Cloud can be defined as an extension to the SOA (Service Oriented Architecture). In simplest terms, the idea is to provide whole software as services in the cloud on certain predefined rental agreements. This idea may seem vague if seen from a home user’s point of view, but it can be a boon to the corporate entities. At present, for almost every organization, whether IT or Non-IT, it has become vital to have a web presence as today, in the era of globalization, with companies having customers around the globe, the first place customers look for information, buying, getting customer services etc is the web. Now in order to manage this kind of web presence, a huge amount of IT infrastructure and manpower is needed. The infrastructure must be designed in such a way that it can serve customers in all parts of the world equally well. The cost of implementing, operating and managing such an infrastructure are great. Cloud based services comes as an answer to this. In this scenario, your web presence is hosted on infrastructures that are managed by companies that specialize in these services. They do all the hard work for you by using their years of experience in managing such systems to take care of yours.
Companies like Microsoft, IBM etc have even made their first steps in this area. Recently, at the Professional Developer’s Conference, Microsoft unveiled its Azure™ which is designed around the same concept and provides professional level services for enterprise data storage, email servers and many other type of services, all running right from the cloud. And with increased support for these technologies in their .NET platform they have even made this easier for their developers to develop applications targeting these platforms.
So all in all, the future looks great for such services as far as corporate users are concerned as it helps them a lot to reduce IT related costs and maintenance headaches. For the home users, there is not much right now, but in the future, if all software is distributed like this, this will led to a steep decrease in piracy rates as well as raising the possibility for user revolts against this. The reviews should be checked through the person for the best pick on cloud storage. The reviews will define the working of the services practically on the desktop of the person. The selection should be done of the top reviews services in the globe.
