Technology Review of Cloud Past, Present and Future: No Ghostly Visitations Necess...

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Technology Review of Cloud Past, Present and Future: No 1 Ghostly Visitations Necessary
Email | Print With apologies to the great Charles Dickens, We would like to present a brief overview of the spirit of cloud past, cloud present, and cloud future. Cloud past: An ethereal presence Rising up out of the mist of the Internet, virtualization, offsite data centers and even ancient concepts like computer time sharing and grid computing, the Internet Gods have smiled on us. The Wise Men (and women) that control our modern-day ethers have taken technology to the next level, but where did it come from? Clouds past brought up images of chain-rattling slowness, surrounded by thieves ready to take advantage of its weak state and pounce unrelentingly. Would we, ten years ago, have used the cloud to run mission-critical, transaction-based apps and deliver them to trusted users around the world? Not likely. It was unproven, the security was not in place, and valid concerns over latency and data reliability and recoverability prevented all but minor apps to move over the cloud. It was a spectral curiosity. To paraphrase Dickens, You dont believe in me, observed the Cloud. There was no way to know in those early days, what that shaky little abstract concept would bring. Because by nature, the cloud is mostly hidden, we thought it to be nonexistent, and it was largely misunderstood to be some single giant mythical beast perhaps, which some ghostly group of Internet geeks conjured out of duct tape and Cat-5 cable for their own amusement. Cloud present: Rise and walk with me. Once we started to understand that the cloud wasnt a cloud at all, but rather, a set of very concrete pieces of equipment located at individual data centers staffed by smart people, which delivered software and infrastructure services over a secure Internet connection, we slowly started to realize the enormous power that it held. Nothing has been the same since. And like a fat Christmas goose, the cloud has enough capacity for everyone, and even more. It is infinitely scalable. Those who sell the cloud now have the knowledge to do it effectively, and the assurance that what they are selling really is worthwhile and capable. When people say, I dont believe, point resolutely to state-of-the-art data centers with 247 staffing, two-factor authentication, virtualization and built-in redundancies with disaster recovery capability. And to paraphrase still another old Christmas passage, Yes, Virginia, there is a cloud. And now that we know what it is, businesspeople everywhere are rushing to embrace it, and its no longer just a curiosityits a competitive necessity. Cloud yet to come: No fog, no mist . . . We are today on the verge of something even greater. Perhaps the only mistake those early conjurers made when they came up with the concept of the cloud, was to name it so. The very name cloud created an environment of distrust, creating an illusion of something that couldnt be seen or touched. What is incredibly remarkable about the time in which we now find ourselves is that we are seeing the beginning of a Renaissance of sorts. Remember the dotcom boom of the 90s? The dotcloud boom of the current decade will make that heady time seem like a flash in the pan. Because the mist has cleared and the cloud is today better understoodand the underlying technology mature enough to handle just about anythingnew opportunities are being created. Yes, it has created a new and disruptive business model, but when Mr. Scrooge himself finally embraced a new business model for himself, he found a better life. So it is with the cloud. Instead of a start-up requiring millions of dollars to launch, it can do so with only a few thousand. Capital expenditures that would have gone to building on-premise data centers in the past, can now be diverted to innovation. Take that to your counting-house! NetStandard, Inc., established in 1996, is a leading information technology business and SSAE 16 compliant data center headquartered at 2000 Merriam Lane in Kansas City, Kansas. We deliver IT managed services, scalable secure data center service and hosted/cloud computing services under Tweet

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the name Myappsanywhere through a nationwide reseller network to small and mid-size businesses. Tweet

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