For years a source of excitement in the IT industry, cloud computing has now entered the popular consciousness.
Along with crowd-sourcing, wikis and Web 2.0, it’s among the latest raft of IT buzzwords to pop up in the national press as well as computer magazines.
“Everyone is aware of cloud computing now and it’s only a few years old,” says Mark Osborn, director at digital marketing consultancy Acertis. “It’s really taken the IT world by storm.”
And yet: who really understands what it means?
Andy Burton, who as chairman of the Cloud Industry Forum explores how to bridge the understanding gap among the public and businesses, says the welter of coverage has seemingly done little to improve people’s grasp of the subject: “We all recognise it is a hyped subject, that it’s getting a lot of coverage.
“Everyone has their own definition of what a ‘cloud’ is – what a private cloud is, what a public cloud is – but there isn’t enough standardisation of language. It all creates confusion, which breeds distrust – the biggest challenge.”
So what does it mean? And will this distrust dissipate as people and businesses become more familiar with the subject?
Cloud computing is cheaper, more flexible and there’s a whole new level of added value
Andrew Corbett, membership services director at the UK IT Association
The concept, technophiles will tell you, has been around for a while already. The germ of an idea was born in the 1960s when renowned computer scientist John McCarthy suggested that “computation may someday be organised as a public utility”.
What that notion has ultimately led to, half a century on, is using software through, and storing data on, the internet, rather than uploading a CD-Rom or saving files onto a hard drive.
The term ‘cloud’ derives from the cloud-like diagrams used to represent computer networks in abstract form.
To some it might seem a recent phenomenon, but companies have been using web-based software (usually called software-as-a-service) and storing data on online ‘clouds’ for some time already. Google Docs, an internet-based rival to the previously unchallenged dominance of Microsoft Office, is gaining traction.
Google recently launched the Chromebook, which it hopes will herald an era where computing through a browser becomes the norm. For the consumer, meanwhile, a number of online services – for example music streaming service Spotify – are effectively cloud applications.
Lower overheads
Andrew Corbett, membership services director at the UK IT Association, lists cloud computing’s advantages as: “Lower overheads, the ability to share data with customers and suppliers and the ability to get access to new types of software like CRM [customer relationship management], business intelligence and so on. It’s cheaper, more flexible and there’s a whole new level of added value.”
And yet, despite these multifarious advantages, most businesses still store their data on their own internal servers and Microsoft Office, stored on each individual computer, still reigns supreme. A third of businesses have no plans to harness cloud computing, according to a recent survey by Easy Connect, up 7% on a year before, suggesting that distrust of the medium is actually growing.
Why is a cutting-edge medium not being embraced more enthusiastically at a time when businesses are doing everything they can to cut costs elsewhere?
Well if the concept’s relative novelty – to the wider public at least – helps propel the PR buzz, then novelty also helps account for doubts about its reliability. In particular, the storage of data is not something businesses and public organisations are willing to take the slightest risk with, and as yet there are widespread misgivings about the security dimension.
