My dear friend; every day, you come here and tell us stories about moving to the cloud. Have you ever thought about the elements? What if we move our data to the cloud and it rains, what becomes our lot?”
Funny, isn’t it? But that was the candid thoughts of a concerned Nigerian banker who was having boardroom discussions with a team of cloud experts.
The reality is that quite a number of people outside technology may ask similar questions and you won’t blame them because the only cloud we all grew up knowing is the one up there.
That said, the word cloud in the world of technology is no longer a buzz word. It is now a word that commands a lot of respect. It is the word any serious, forward looking organization will hear and the management will either leap for joy or shudder in fear depending on what situation they find themselves.
Cloud computing can be referred to as the practice of using a network of remote servers, hosted on the internet to store, manage and process data, rather than on a local server, owned solely by an individual or organization.
Simply put, it is a bunch of networked servers, serving a large number of organizations across geographical boundaries. Businesses can choose to deploy applications on public, private or hybrid clouds.
I will attempt to give a layman’s description of how the cloud infrastructure works. Let us say you are the chief executive of a large corporation. Part of your responsibilities includes ensuring that your staffers have access to the right hardware and software to help them perform optimally. Purchasing computers for everyone is not the only thing you will be doing. You also have to buy the requisite software or obtain software licenses, sometimes for single or multiple users.
Let me provide some more basic examples that will make it extremely easy for an average Bola to understand using everyday tools we have all come to love.
Do you know that the process of using Facebook or Instagram to store your photos is a form of leveraging cloud technology? If you have an email address and you still have access to mails sent five to 10 years ago; then just understand that you are already leveraging cloud technology.
Do you use tools such as dropbox, evernote, onedrive or google drive? These would also give you a feel of how cloud technology works and finally, examples of more advanced cloud servers include the likes of IBM bluemix, Amazon’s AWS and many others. — Finish Reading on the Punch Website
