Little fluffy clouds or one really big one?

"To the Cloud!" was the catch phrase of the actors on that Windows 7 advert. But what does that actually mean? What is "the cloud"?

Well the cloud itself has been around as the long internet, or arguably, even longer, and it is the internet, kind of. When the buzz word Cloud is thrown around they are really talking about Cloud Computing. Again to quote Wikipedia:

"Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility (like the electricity grid) over a network (typically the Internet)."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing

Here in the Australia for home and small business users, Cloud Computing will probably have more of an impact once the NBN (National Broadband Network) gets rolled out. But in reality people have been using these kind of services ever since the internet started to gain popularity in the late 90s. One example being Hotmail.


Something the Cloud (and the NBN in Australia) will trigger the return of, is the dumb or thin terminal. One example of this is the Chromebook which Google launched last year, which in IMO was a bit premature. My company has been phasing our thin terminals out, which in all possibly, could eventually be phased back some time in the future.

From our companies point of view, we are maybe looking at an email filtering solution that will sit in the cloud. But I can't see us moving too many more services into the cloud in the near future. We've already got most of our infrastructure in place, and at this stage, there would be no real gain in moving our major services "to the cloud".


And for partially inspiring the title of this post (and the fact it has the word cloud(s) in it) here is "Little Fluffy Clouds" by the Orb. Enjoy!