To the Cloud

Have you shared photos on Flickr? Ever watch a clip on YouTube, then post it on Facebook? Maybe you’ve updated a spreadsheet for work on Google Docs? 

If so, then congratulations, you’ve soared to “the cloud” without wings and lived to tell about it! 

Once tossed around in techie circles, the term “the cloud” (or rather “cloud computing”) had made it’s way into the mainstream jargon  via marketing campaigns and ads.

It’s being sold as something shiny and new, but in actuality, it isn’t. The underlying concept for cloud computing dates back to the 1960s. It has since evolved in a number of ways, but didn’t make huge leaps and bounds until the 1990s when improved technology and bandwidth brought the Internet to the masses. 

Since then, we now read books, newspapers, and magazine online. We pay our bills, watch movies, and make purchases through websites. The Internet helps us manage our contacts, book reservations, guide us to a location, and find a date. And of course, how could we forget the wonderful world of blogging! 

Tom Lambert created and shared this visual on his blog, which illustrates cloud computing brilliantly: 

Rather than managing your stuff on your personal computer (e.g. directories, music, documents, etc), you benefit from the collaborative efforts of millions of people uploading resources to and generating content for the web, which you then have access to on demand.

Cloud computing truly is everything and the kitchen sink.  Yet, there are promises of even more to come.

The term “the cloud” is being used more and more these days by manufactures, particularly those interested in selling new computers. The ironic thing about that is cloud computing makes individual platforms or systems largely irrelevant…. 

With documents, files, photos, and videos being uploaded to a third-party’s server and accessed via the web, we are no longer so heavily dependant on our personal computers, or even flash drives and disks. 

According to Google’s charming ebook, 20 Things I Learned about Browsers and the Web:

Not too long ago, many of us worried about losing our documents, photos and files if something bad happened to our computers, like a virus or a hardware malfunction. Today, our data is migrating beyond the boundaries of our personal computers. Instead, we’re moving our data online into “the cloud”. If you upload your photos, store critical files online and use a web-based email service like Gmail or Yahoo! Mail, an 18-wheel truck could run over your laptop and all your data would still safely reside on the web, accessible from any Internet-connected computer, anywhere in the world.

In his post, Lambert goes on to say, “[cloud computing] is already a mainstream practice people take advantage of daily but this is barely scraping the surface of what cloud computing is capable of.” 

With so much being developed so quickly, you can guarantee that this technology has also spurned a great deal of controversy. In a follow-up post, we will weight the pros and cons of “the cloud” as presented by various industry experts.

{image credit: Daedalus and Icarus. Painting by Charles-Paul Landon, 1760-1826. Musée Beaux-Arts et de la Dentelle, Alençon}