What Is Cloud Computing

Cloud Computing

The computing and internet paradigms have been advancing very rapidly over the last decades. During much of the advancement, the real word computing and the online computing part of the equation has largely been separate. While people have embraced and widely used the internet realm for their benefit, they were still very much tied to the computer they were operating in, and in a number of ways Just one of those ways is storage. If a person wanted to store a file, application or something else off other internet, this would require storage on the local machine. However, this has markedly changed as cloud computing has enabled the use and storage of data and applications in a strictly online fashion. While cloud computing is a long way from being perfected, it has come a long way over the years that it has existed thus far.

Analysis

There are still two realms, just as there has been before, when it comes to computing. There are still local machines like desktop computers, laptops, tablets and smartphones, the latter two being much more extensively used than they have been in the past. However, the depth and breadth of the online realm of computing has expanded significantly in both size and capability. Rather than online storage and computing being an occasional thing that people use here and there, it is now much more commonplace to store data in online "drives," to send files via "drop-off" services like DropBox so as to avoid the security, privacy and encryption shortfalls of email and even the launching and use of applications through web browsers or even application servers. PC Magazine defines cloud computing in fairly simple terms, that being that it refers to storing and accessing data and programs via the internet rather than having them on one's client or home computer alone (Griffith, 2016).

As very much indicated above, the business world has made great use of the cloud computing paradigm in that many applications and other tools/methods used before that used to be done on client machines, in whole or in part, are now done online. Just one example of this is known as Software as a Service, or SaaS for short. This is a setup and service that allows people to sign up quickly, use applications and/or data basically right away, no data is lost if the client machine breaks or fails and the service can shift or evolve dynamically if resources need to be moved or sent elsewhere. For those that actually develop and refine programs and applications, business can go bit further and have a Platform as a Service (PaaS) instead (IBM, 2016).