Wednesday 08 September 2010
Whether he’s at home, at work, at the lake or at his in-laws, whenever Tommy Vallier needs to send an invoice to clients, he just goes to the nearest computer. It doesn’t matter which computer, because no one hard drive stores his files. It’s all in the cloud. On the Internet. Forget Microsoft Office, Vallier, a freelance Web developer in Kingston, writes and saves his documents on Google Docs. I now use the Web to manage my email, calendar, contacts, to- do lists, quick notes to myself, news, podcasts, photos, videos and documents,” he said. “It’s all about access.
Hence the great promise of cloud computing, the idea of putting all computing needs on the Internet rather than a local machine. All your data and applications are accessible from anywhere, at any time. No need to invest in expensive servers without knowing if you’ll use them to capacity. No need for multiple systems administrators in the IT back office. With cloud computing, you let someone else worry about the hardware and software and pay them only for what you use. This has been the mantra of major cloud computing vendors scrambling for customers, companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, and myriad smaller providers.
On the consumer side, Microsoft and Telus will soon let Canadians store their medical records online to share with doctors. There’s no shortage of analogies for cloud computing. It has been described as taking a taxi rather than buying a car. Or using the postal service instead of having a private delivery truck. In his book The Big Switch, journalist Nicholas Carr compared it to the rise of the electricity grid, when factories stopped buying and running their own power generators and paid utilities. One can also prototype ideas and applications on the Web with a limited number of test users, creating a low-cost virtual test lab. Files on office computers and mobile gadgets are automatically synchronized.
