David Heath
Sunday, 19 July 2009 19:51
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
But once there, they rapidly moved to become the dominant force.
These days, there are any number of dominant players – salesforce.com being an obvious example, that occupy the completely interactive space.
This was the beginning of “the cloud.” There are plenty of factors that drove its adoption -increasing Internet speed, improved performance confidence, even certainty in the safety of remotely stored data – however, the cloud was waiting for a reason to shine – perhaps a recent iTWire item
How Green was my Cloud - gave a reason – so-called 'green computing.'
Cloud computing is based on the premise that the advantages of off-site computing significantly outweigh the disadvantages. There are a number of factors at play here; interestingly, the pro-cloud factors are generally logical and factual, while the anti-cloud factors are considerably more tenuous.
Pro-cloud:
- Cost of ownership – the rental of a share of an asset must be cheaper than ownership
- Multiple layers of redundancy – don't expect a cloud-hosting data centre to be off-line very often (and they'll have more experts to get it back online than you could ever summon)
- Accessible from anywhere there is an Internet connection
Anti-cloud:
- Loss of control
- Relocation of computing resources from asset list to profit-and-loss statement (dammit, I like to be able to see the computers that are hosting my data)
- Issues of trust
Certainly there are applications that require huge infrastructure levels at the desktop – image editing for instance – cloud computing will probably never be seen here; but for the vast majority of applications, there is really no need to fight the cloud.
Is it becoming clearer just how important Chrome OS is? Read on.
