The Silver Lining

At Fathers Day dinner my Dad began talking about 'The Cloud'. I told him he needs to stop making up his own terms for things and there was no such thing (good daughter right?). Monday morning comes and what are we learning about in a meeting at work? The bloody Cloud. So I suppose I better do my reasearch so at least when Dad does a little dance and says, 'I'm always right, its my job, I'm your Dad.' as he usually does I can throw back with some new found knowledge to shut him up.

From what I have researched Cloud Computing sounds pretty amazing. There's a good chance you've already used some form of cloud computing. If you have an e-mail account with a Web-based e-mail service like Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail or Gmail like I do, then you've had some experience with cloud computing. The way it works is, instead of running an e-mail program on your computer, you log in to a web based e-mail account remotely. The software and storage for your account doesn't exist on your computer -- it's on the service's computer cloud.

When it comes to business it is even more exciting. Let's say you're an executive at a large corporation. Your particular responsibilities include making sure that all of your employees have the right hardware and software they need to do their jobs. Buying computers for everyone isn't enough -- you also have to purchase software to give employees the tools they require. Whenever you have a new hire, you have to buy more software or make sure your current software license allows another user. It's so stressful that you find it difficult to go to sleep on your huge pile of money every night.
Soon, there may be an alternative for executives like you. Instead of installing a suite of software for each computer, you'd only have to load one application. That application would allow workers to log into a Web-based service which hosts all the programs the user would need for his or her job. Remote machines owned by another company would run everything from e-mail to word processing to complex data analysis programs.

It's called cloud computing, and it could change the entire computer industry.