Grahame Turner explains the cloud server and its process. The future of computers, according to some companies, Google especially, is in the clouds–cloud computing, to be precise. A cloud-optimized server will make the Internet an even more powerful entity.
- Cloud Computing
- The cloud is comprised of all the Internet accounts where you can store information: e-mail, online documents, accounts at an Internet radio site, and other places. One of the simplest examples of Cloud Computing is a program such as Google Documents. When you create an account, your documents are accessible from any computer with an Internet connection–because the information is stored on the Google Documents server, not on your computer. Google Documents is only one cloud-based application, although there are many of them on the Internet.
Benefits
- Access is biggest benefit with a cloud application. Most existing programs are extremely simple, yet very secure: anyone can log in if you have an account and a password. This means an employee isn’t tethered to his computer anymore, because with a cloud server, he can access his documents on any other machine. Another huge benefit is how these systems easily utilize existing technologies; cloud applications are lightweight and need little additional software.
Potential
- Imagine being stuck at an airport with the vital documents for an upcoming meeting. You can upload these documents to a cloud server and share them with your co-workers. Hop onto the company cloud chat app, and you can chat with them during the meeting, even though you’re at an airport terminal.
Hardware
- Cloud servers are actually lighter than servers used in traditional business transactions. That’s because these servers aren’t being used to store and access documents–that information stays on a database. Instead, all these servers have to do is run a website. The lightness of cloud computing also makes servers less expensive since they’re carrying less hardware.
Significance
- Cloud servers transcend operating systems. A Mac user accesses the same Internet as a PC user. This makes the cloud an incredibly important innovation, because software compatibility is no longer an issue.
