Tuesday, December 7, 2010

Cloudy on Cloud computing?

It’s not just the Cloud, but Clouds.

Just as you access multiple cable channels you can access multiple clouds.

A good way of thinking about The Cloud is like cable channels. You have a basic package and can add as many other channels both paid and free as you work in the Cloud.

The three segments of cloud computing:

1. Cloud Infrastructure, the hardware and other infrastructure to be a cloud provider.

2. Network Services, which provides the interconnection between all the points of a cloud, including the connection from the client to the cloud provider.

3. Cloud Applications which concerns specific applications that would be accessed in the cloud instead of on-premise, such as HR, CRM or document management -- what's commonly known as software-as-a-service.

As the IT industry moves to cloud computing one fact remains unmistakable: the cloud, still has to exist in the physical world as a data center full of heavy iron and humming like the factory that it is -- a factory manufacturing compute cycles.

The biggest legitimate cloud provider is Google, made up of 500,000 systems, 1 million CPUs and 1,500 gigabits per second (Gbps) of bandwdith. Amazon comes in second with 160,000 systems, 320,000 CPUs and 400 Gbps of bandwidth, while Rackspace offers 65,000 systems, 130,000 CPUs and 300 Gbps.

You access one very secure cloud when you do online banking. You access another cloud when you buy online music for example. The payment for the music may come from the banking cloud so their connected but separate.

It is generally agreed that this dark web is much larger than the World Wide Web.

The world wide web could be considered one cloud, but it’s not the only cloud. There are clouds referred to as being in the dark web.

This is information that is not indexed by the popular search engines. It is shared on the web but only to authorized users. Most of the time this information is accessed through VPN’s (virtual private networks) and you need credentials to log on. Companies large and small collaborate and share information this way.

For more information on managing you data in the cloud, contact me or visit my website http://www.paulgoda.com