What is the Cloud?

How useful is the cloud to service and product companies? What is the "cloud"? Modern companies behave in certain ways to take advantage of the cloud-age. What steps can we reasonably indicate to introduce our company data and procedures into the cloud? Which companies take advantage of the "cloud"? In a conference I recently attended, a phrase that made me think, translated from English, is the following: "Either you voluntarily face the cloud or you will inevitably be engulfed by the cloud". We know that time in computing is very fast; just think that less than 10 years ago, neither Facebook nor YouTube existed... and Google was still in a garage... Today, the definition of a computer includes the concept of connection... an electronic device is no longer a computer if it is not connected to the network... a computer is a smartphone like a laptop... like a tablet... and tomorrow, a PC will be a cloud service on a TV... But let's answer the initial question: what is the CLOUD? We receive the current electricity or methane gas or digital channels on TV and use these services without knowing exactly where they come from. It doesn't matter to the end user to know if their electricity comes from a power plant 10 km or 40 km away... We use electricity, watch TV without knowing where the signal or current comes from... It's not information that interests the end user for the purpose of using the services. In the cloud, referring to the network of domestic services, we can say that all household services are generated in a cloud and we use them as they are proposed, i.e., without auxiliary information, such as production location and distribution mode, transfer methods, and other information that is not useful to us end users. The cloud computing is the same concept but related to computing resources, software, access to data, data storage, and everything that does not require the end user to know where the systems that provide the aforementioned services are physically located, as well as how they are provided. Probably, you are using cloud computing but are not aware of it... the concept of digital divide is very present in our society. We use technologies without knowing that they are virtual resources that are not physically tangible. Gradually, we realize that what we use every day, such as Google mail or calendar, or Google Map resources, come from the cloud... But there's more... undoubtedly, if we use some particular web sites and services, we become more aware that the data we use can be inserted and retrieved in the cloud without knowing where they are actually stored or processed. Some web sites heavily use the concept of CLOUD: I list here some sites (the list could be very long) that I use to store and work with my data in the cloud: www.dropbox.com, www.evernote.com, picasa.google.it, www.salesforce.com, www.wikio.com, www.gmail.com, www.yammer.com, www.digg.com. In my next article on the cloud, I will go a bit more into the technical and specific aspects. I will try to make it clear that the same computer or operating system can be a cloud service. Goodbye local hard disks and USB ports... a new revolution is about to arrive. In the 80s, computers arrived in the homes of billions of people in the world (I remember that there are still 1.5 billion people who do not have running water or a bathroom at home) and soon, physical computers as we conceive them now will disappear in the next 10 years. Screens and tablets connected to the cloud will be sufficient... (local storage and disks will no longer be necessary). I will provide more information on these theoretical and divulgative topics, as well as on how to create sites with cloud resources. I hope to be able to deploy a killer application that demonstrates how to use cloud resources as soon as possible... If you want to receive our newsletter, register here and to the side, and to receive updates. Marco Palladino