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Imagine a world where “eventually, like the smart house in the TV series Eureka, your devices will learn about you and eventually intuit what you are doing, where you are going, and what you intend to do when you get there. Think of all this as helpful… not creepy” (Tadjer, 2010, p. 1).
This is the future that cloud computing is expected to bring to us. Cloud computing gives the capability of connecting and accessing all your pertinent data, both personal and professional, from any online source (Tadjer, 2010) Essentially, it is having all of your data in one place, known as the “cloud”, and having the power to easily access it anywhere and everywhere you go and at your own convenience. You will be able to mine, organize, and share your data with just a quick click of a button (Tadjer, 2010). This paper will further explore cloud computing: it will define and explain cloud computing, its advantages and disadvantages, the security issues involved, and the implementation of cloud computing. Many of us are already using simple forms of cloud computing without even knowing it.
Two examples of very basic cloud services are Facebook and Twitter. You can access your Facebook or Twitter accounts online using a computer or your smartphone. According to Steven Guggenheimer, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s OEM division, the basis of cloud computing is to “to get content to behave consistently across a range of very different devices” (Tadjer, 2010, p. 2). So how does cloud computing exactly work?
Technically, cloud computing is when “remote machines owned by another company would run everything”; this includes everything from email services to social networking applications to corporate software applications (Strickland, 2008, p. 1). For example, when a person signs up for Gmail, Google is providing the remote machines that run Gmail’s emailing service which it is providing to its users. According to Strickland (2008), “the only thing the user's computer needs to be able to run is the cloud computing system's interface software, which can be as simple as a Web browser, and the cloud's network takes care of the rest” (p. 1).
To break it down in simpler terms, cloud computing consists of two parts. The first part is called the “front end”, this is the data that the user of the cloud receives or sees (Strickland, 2008). The second part is called the “back end”; this consists of all the machines, servers, computers, and various components that create the “cloud” (Strickland, 2008). These two parts put together makes up cloud computing.