Why even non-geeks should get excited by cloud computing
The good old days of physical computers
In the good old days of the 90s, we'd have one computer to do one thing. We'd have a file server to store our files, a mail server to run our email and desktop and laptop PCs for people to use. Typically, each of these machines would be designed to be able to cope with the maximum expected peaks in demand. For example the mail server would be sized to cope with everyone in the office hitting their email at a busy time like 9am on the first Monday back in January. For the web server you'd try and guess what the maximum peak traffic would be and get a server to handle that. The net result of this was that most computers sat around all day using less than 1% of their capability. Together they had a brain the size of a planet and what were they doing? Running screensavers.
Virtualisation
A few years ago some bright sparks in the software business invented a way to make more use of this wasted capacity. With a technology called virtualisation they gave us the ability to split one physical computer into several virtual ones. Rather than having one computer for email, one for the office file server and so on, we could run all of that on one physical machine instead of several. The problem with this was that the peaks and spikes we worried about in the 90s were still there, just with virtualisation we were betting on the peaks for each application (email, files, web) never happening at the same time.
Data centres
In the last few years broadband internet connections have got much, much faster and more reliable. So reliable in fact that many companies have decided to ditch the server room in their office and move their servers into an off-site data centre. They'd save costs on electricity, floor space and probably the wages of a support guy or two. This resulted in an explosion in the number and size of data centres worldwide.
The cloud
Not so long ago, some geeks were working in a data centre watching over computers that despite virtualisation were still only running at about 5-10% of their capacity. At lunchtime they'd pool their cash together and buy a big family bucket from KFC to save money. They wondered what would happen if all the computers in the whole data centre could club together too and act like one giant computer. They could use this one massive virtual computer to do geek things that would normally take hours in milliseconds. Wow. Then one of them reminded the others that the customers would still need their applications running on the machines in the data centre. The answer was plain - run these applications as virtual machines on the massive virtual computer. This is cloud computing.
Stretchy computers
Because cloud computing gives you a virtual machine and not a physical one, changing the size of it happens in software and not hardware. So to make a machine more powerful or give it bigger storage, there's no need to buy and install hardware, one can simply move a slider on a screen. In fact it's even easier than that. Software knows how hard it is working and how much storage it is using, so it can move the sliders automatically, without you having to get involved at all.
What's in it for me?
What does this mean for business? Well for starters there's no more worrying about if the office file server, email server or web server can cope with demand. The software business will change dramatically too. Rather than software coming on a CD for you to install and look after on your own equipment, software will increasingly be a service. The software company (or a reseller) runs the software in the cloud and you'll interact with it using a web browser. There's be no need for you to worry about upgrades, security patches, backup and all that IT hassle.
Many companies are already doing this with their email service and more services will follow. At unity*dc we already run a lot of our computing on the cloud. We run our project extranet on the cloud. We back up all our old projects onto cloud storage. Our email and even our phone system runs on the cloud. What's the benefit for us? Flexibility. A new team member joins and all we need to do is buy them an iMac and an IP phone. Ten people join and it's the same. If they want to work from home, no problem. Our project extranet, email and even the office phones work there too. Need us to do number crunching on 2 million customer records? No problem. Even if our office burns down, we just grab a Regus suite and we can be fully operational again in under 24 hours.
The cloud can save you money. To run email on a physical server we would have to buy the hardware and software up front for around £2000 and it's obsolete after 3 years. That's over £650 a year - as long as nothing ever goes wrong with it. On the cloud email costs us around £200 a year and for that we get full backup and 24/7 technical support on the phone.
The cloud can save your bacon, too. There are applications (one is called "Jungle Disk") that can back up your computer to the cloud whilst you are working. So if your laptop gets stolen from your car, you need not lose all your valuable data as well.
I hope that's whetted your appetite for the cloud - it's a great new development for us non-techies who really only wanted the thing to work like it said it would. Now go and give your IT manager a fright.