It’s getting cloudy

Anyone using a computer today has at least had the experience of their computer crashing once. Either you mistakenly deleted some files that can never be replaced or your hard drive did that for you. What about viruses? Where they came from? Whoops, there goes the Master Boot Record.

If only your PC could be like Facebook, everything from your messages, applications and photos all stored online. Who says it can’t?

Welcome to cloud computing.

The idea here is that wherever you go, your work and data follows you. Web 3.0 is seen as this force that’s going to break the barrier between the IT and telecommunications world. Here’s how. Instead of having your data and applications stored and processed by your PC’s hardware, it’s done on other computers and servers. Why?

Cause you get to access it from anywhere as long as you’re connected to the internet. All your files are stored online, so are your programs. If your hard disk dies, you lose nothing.

Furthermore, it’s also faster, eliminating the need for high end hardware. Whatever you do on your desktop; you can have the same experience on your Smart phone despite its 600MHz ARM CPU. How come? Through parallel computing. Just like today’s processors can use multiple cores to divide and spread the workload, that’s exactly how hundreds of computers will be used to process your information or application and pass the data over an internet connection to any device.

No longer will speed be defined by hardware, instead by your internet connection speed.

Can anyone guess the downside to this? Leave your thoughts below!

References:

Ted Hoy, Converging Cloud Computing and the Web, [Online], Retrieved 14th February 2011
URL: http://www.ebizq.net/topics/cloud_computing/features/12477.html?