Cloud Computing

You may have heard people talking about cloud computing and wondered exactly what this means. In today’s article, I will explain a little about what cloud computing is, and where it came from.

Cloud computing is used to distribute resources across a network of computers. This allows lots of users to have access to the same application or program at the same time. Cloud environments are becoming more and more popular as the demand for resources grows. Cloud networks have the ability to spread the required resources of programs across your whole network, rather than depending on one server to handle everything.
Distributing tasks across a network helps us minimize downtime as it builds an environment that has the ability recover itself. For example if you have three machines running in a cloud environment that run hosting services such as a web server, mail server and database server, a cloud network environment will be able to detect if these nodes becomes unresponsive. The cloud network will then run those services on an alternative machine and notify the network administrators so that they can perform maintenance on any damaged areas. In practice, this allows network engineers to make changes to a network without anybody noticing!

History

The original concept of cloud computing came around in the 1950′s when large-scale mainframes were used to provide resources across multiple clients. It was quite common that CPU time of a large mainframes (sometimes these were the size of a whole office!) would be split across lots of clients. This was a very cost effective solution for companies and allowed for batch processes to be handled much quicker.
In 1969, J.C.R. Licklider (who was also responsible for ARPANET) stated that everyone on the globe should be connected and have access to the same data from anywhere. The first real milestone for cloud computing though was not until 1999, when salesforce.com started to offer enterprise applications over the internet.
Cloud computing has been held back due to the restrictions on available bandwidth across towns and city’s. This is starting to become less of an issue now though with the introduction of many cloud based services such as Google Apps, Dropbox and Skydrive. These companies have built large scale clouds that handle our data, as there is no physical location for our files, we refer to it as being “in the cloud”.
At Freezone, we use a cloud environment for our core structure and many of our shared hosting services. We use a similar concept mentioned before where if one part of the network goes down, the wider scale will not be affected and your services will run in an alternative part of the cloud network. There are many advantages to this, as it makes customer data much more accessible and the overall network is a lot more flexible. Other benefits include reliability, redundancy and scalability. Our network administrates have the ability to work on and deploy services very easily which helps us provide a reliable service to our customers.

Advantages

The main advantages of cloud computing are reliability, flexibility and expansion. With a cloud network in place, it is very easy for network administrators to perform maintenance on a particular part of a network without affecting everyone else. You could think of a cloud working in a very similar way to the internet. With the internet, if one part of your route is down, the data packets will try and find an alternative route to the end destination. Cloud works by making services accessible to everyone, and if your services are affected in one part of the network, they should come up somewhere else to minimize downtime.
Another great thing about cloud computing is that expanding a network can be very easy. Back when mainframes were being used, it was possible to take a processor out of the mainframe without its users being affected. A cloud environment allows network administrators to add new servers and services to a network without having to turn anything off!

Disadvantages

Although cloud has its advantages, there are also some drawbacks. The main concern for businesses when they are considering a cloud network is security. Not keeping your sensitive files in a central, contained environment can be an issue for some companies. When files are stored in a “cloud”, companies must take extra steps to ensure that the sensitive parts of the cloud are safe. Having files stored in a cloud network rather than one central machine can make things safer though – if this has been done correctly.
Another concern that some have is cost. Investing in a new architecture for your network is never going to be cheap. This being said, cloud networking is an excellent future investment that will future proof your network. As I mentioned earlier, cloud networks allow administrators to avoid downtime. When a network is down, businesses may find it very hard to run their day to day tasks. Making sure your network downtime is reduced can actually save you a lot of money.

The bottom line

Despite the worries about security and upfront cost holding cloud computing back, it is a great technology that is becoming more and more popular as networks and the internet develops.
Many experts will agree that cloud computing will become normal practice for modern day networks. Most medium to large companies will already be using some kind of cloud based network, and it is only a matter of time before we all use a more reliable and flexible network.
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