The era of Cloud Computing

The nature and tendency of humans is inquisitive, previously most people were concerned about how to obtain computers in their offices, schools and homes. The main reason behind that was in order to get close to the world and communicate and exchange data via these devices. But today people are concerned about the Internet and its speed for effective and efficient communication, therefore Cloud Computing comes into demand. 

Cloud computing refers to the provision of computational resources on demand via a computer network based on internet protocol. Submission of  a task by users or clients such as word processing, to the service provider, such as Google, without actually possessing the required software or hardware. The consumer’s computer may contain very little software or data, serving as little more than a display terminal connected to the Internet.

Cloud Computing means accessing the data and services over the Internet, usually in a completely seamless way.

When you prepare documents over the internet it is a newer example of cloud computing like Google Documents where you can create a document, spreadsheet, presentation, or whatever you like using Web-based software. You do not require to maintain or type words into a program like Microsoft Word that is running on your computer.

 

The history of Cloud Computing started in the 1960s and in recent years the technology has served to shake-up both the enterprise IT and supplier landscape.

Before Cloud Computing, there was Client/Server computing which is basically a centralized storage in which all the software applications, all the data and all the controls are resided on the server side.

If a single user wants to access specific data or run a program, he/she needs to connect to the server and then gain appropriate access, and then he/she can do his/her business.

After all these efforts, distributed computing came into effect, where all the computers are networked together and share their resources with each other.

On the basis of above computing, there emerged cloud computing concepts that later were implemented.

• Around 1961, John MacCharty suggested in a speech at MIT that computing can be sold like a utility, just like water or electricity.
• In 1999, Salesforce.com started delivering applications to users using a simple website. The applications were adopted and used over the Internet, and this way the dream of computing sold as utility were true.
• In 2002, Amazon started Amazon Web Services, which started providing services like storage, computation and even human intelligence. 
• In 2009, cloud computing enterprise applications provided by Google Apps started.
•  In 2009, Windows Azure launched by Microsoft, and companies like Oracle and HP have all joined hand with them.